Author: Winnie, CryptoPulse
When SpaceX announced that Wang Chun, co-founder of F2Pool, would serve as the commander of the first commercial manned interstellar flight mission, many people's initial reaction was shock. Why would a Bitcoin mining pool founder make it onto the Mars mission roster?
However, if one truly understands Wang Chun's experiences over the past decade and the deepening ties between the crypto industry and SpaceX today, it becomes clear that this event is not accidental, but rather an inevitable result as a new era gradually takes shape.
Because today's Mars plan is no longer just an aerospace engineering project; it has begun to transform into a civilization-upgrading experiment driven by global tech capital, AI, computing power, energy, and the crypto economy. And Wang Chun happens to stand at the convergence point of these forces.
I. From F2Pool to SpaceX: Wang Chun's Leapfrog Journey
In today's crypto world, F2Pool is almost a living fossil. It was founded during an era when Bitcoin was still very marginal, was one of the earliest large-scale mining pools globally, and also long held a significant share of the world's Bitcoin hashrate.
And Wang Chun is one of China's earliest true Bitcoin evangelists and infrastructure builders.
Many people's current understanding of the crypto space revolves around memes, trading, speculation, and KOLs. But in the crypto world around 2011, the core players weren't financial speculators; they were a group of geeks, engineers, and idealists.
They believed the future of the internet needed a new type of value network independent of the traditional financial system. Thus, the earliest miners began building rigs, studying algorithms, maintaining nodes, and constructing hashpower networks. Wang Chun was one of the most typical figures of that era.
The most important significance of F2Pool wasn't just about mining for profit, but that it helped the Bitcoin network truly form a global-scale infrastructure. Because any decentralized network ultimately requires hardware, energy, and computing power support in the real world. In other words, miners are essentially the energy workers of the digital world.
This is also a key reason why Wang Chun later gradually began focusing on aerospace, deep space exploration, and even Mars plans.
Because, looking at the underlying logic, both the Bitcoin network and space civilization belong to the category of infrastructure civilization. They both require long-termism, extremely high engineering capabilities, and imagination for the future world.
Therefore, Wang Chun is not like a traditional financial player; he is more like a builder from the era of technological utopia. This is also why he was later able to gradually enter Elon Musk's aerospace ecosystem.
Because the people Musk truly respects are never merely capital players, but those willing to invest long-term and genuinely believe in the narrative of future civilization.
II. Why Are the Crypto Circle and SpaceX Getting Closer?
Over the past few years, a very clear trend is that the connection between the crypto industry and frontier tech fields like SpaceX, AI, and robotics is rapidly strengthening. Many people find it strange—what exactly is the relationship between rockets and Bitcoin?
But in reality, the connection between them is deepening.
Because the core of today's global tech competition has gradually evolved from internet application competition to infrastructure competition. And the crypto industry and SpaceX are essentially part of the next generation of infrastructure.
First, what is SpaceX's core mission?
It is to reduce the cost of human access to space. In the past, sending one kilogram of cargo into space cost tens of thousands of dollars. The goal of Starship is to compress that cost to tens of dollars. Once achieved, the entire economic model of human society will be transformed.
Because with low-cost access to space, orbital servers could emerge, space energy could explode, global satellite internet will further proliferate, and even future Mars bases begin to possess practical feasibility.
And these new worlds will require new payment systems, new value networks, and new globalized financial systems.
Thus, cryptocurrency naturally gains an opportunity to enter the space economy.
Because the traditional financial system is fundamentally built on national sovereignty and geographical boundaries. But if an interplanetary economy emerges in the future, traditional banking systems will struggle to cover it.
Blockchain is inherently suited for globalized, cross-regional, trustless value circulation. This is also why more and more tech geeks believe cryptocurrency is likely to become an important component of the future space economy.
Beyond that, there is a deeper reason. That is, the crypto circle and SpaceX essentially share the same spiritual core.
They both belong to high-risk long-termism.
Early Bitcoin was considered impossible to succeed; SpaceX also faced bankruptcy multiple times. But whether Bitcoin believers or Mars plan supporters, they are willing to believe in a goal that seems utterly crazy in the short term but could change the world in the long run.
So today, you'll find more and more people in the crypto industry starting to pay attention to SpaceX, Starlink, AI, robotics, brain-computer interfaces, space energy, supercomputing power... because these things are gradually forming the next generation of civilization systems.
What mattered most in the past internet era were traffic platforms, while what may matter most in the future era are energy, computing power, AI, and space infrastructure.
And the crypto economy could become the value layer within this system.
III. Human Spaceflight History Is Entering the Era of Commercial Civilization
Many interpret this event as a Chinese entrepreneur about to fly by Mars. But in reality, the truly significant aspect of this event far exceeds a piece of commercial space news. Because behind it lies the implication that the power structure of human spaceflight history is changing.
For decades, space exploration has been a state activity—the US, the former Soviet Union, China—relying on state finances, military-industrial systems, and political will.
But today, commercial spaceflight is fundamentally altering this model. SpaceX has proven that private companies can also lead a space revolution.
And Wang Chun's entry into an interstellar mission further indicates that future participants in deep space exploration may no longer be limited to professional astronauts.
Entrepreneurs, engineers, AI researchers, owners of tech capital, and even future robotics experts could all enter space.
This is actually very similar to the Age of Discovery in the 15th century.
Initially, oceanic exploration relied on national fleets. But what truly drove global expansion later was commercial capital. The British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company were essentially tools of commercial civilization expansion.
And today's SpaceX is beginning to possess similar attributes. The difference is that what was crossed in the past were oceans, while what is being crossed now is interstellar space.
More crucially, Wang Chun also made a very important statement this time: "We should not leave the landing plan to the next generation." This statement essentially reminds SpaceX not to deviate from the original intention of a multi-planetary civilization due to commercialization and real-world pressures.
Because over the past year, with the AI explosion, data center construction, and NASA's lunar plan advancement, part of SpaceX's focus has clearly begun shifting toward the Moon.
Compared to Mars, the Moon is easier to commercialize. But Mars is the true key to determining whether humanity can become a multi-planetary civilization.
So today's Mars plan is no longer merely a tech project. It is more like a civilization faith.
And Wang Chun's appearance means that the new capital forces, new tech communities, and new idealists accumulated from the past crypto world are now formally entering the interstellar era.
Conclusion
To summarize, the most shocking aspect of this event is not that an individual is about to fly by Mars, but that the dominant force behind human civilization expansion is gradually shifting from state machinery to tech companies, AI systems, and globalized technology capital.
From mining pool to Mars, from the Bitcoin network to starships, Wang Chun's experience might be an early preview of the direction of technological civilization evolution over the next few decades.
