By: Bibi News
On May 21, 2026, during the global live broadcast of SpaceX's Starship V3 launch, Wang Chun, co-founder of F2Pool, stood on the most remote island in the South Atlantic, Bouvet Island, and announced that he would soon command the Starship to execute humanity's first crewed interplanetary flight mission: a flyby of Mars.
Many people know F2Pool, a mining pool that has cumulatively mined over 1.3 million bitcoins, accounting for more than 9% of all Bitcoin blocks in human history and, at its peak, holding one-third of the network's total hashrate.
The funds heading to Mars primarily came from his mining pool fee income accumulated over more than a decade since starting F2Pool in 2013, as well as wealth generated from his stake.fish PoS business founded in 2018.
His X profile continues to be updated with records: following the ISO 3166 standard, documenting travels to every country and region in the world, currently having explored 60% of one celestial body (150 out of 249), still updating......
The Vast Blank on the Map
In 1987, Wang Chun's grandfather brought home a found world map. Wang Chun lay down and was captivated by the enormous blank space in the polar regions at the map's bottom. He was five years old then, living mostly with his grandparents, rarely venturing far, yet he was already deeply drawn to those distant and unknown places.
At age 13, upon graduating elementary school, he saved up to buy his first 486SX computer. He wrote himself a planetary gravity simulator and watched the solar system's motion trajectories on the monitor.
On the first day of registering for QQ in middle school, he set his name to 1. The next day he changed it to 2, the day after to 3, incrementing daily like this, persisting for nearly seven years, counting all the way up to 2523, until one day he found it boring and stopped.
No special reason to start, no particular reason to stop, and finally that number remained there forever. The '2' in F2Pool's name later came from this QQ number.
Although this habit stopped, his way of understanding the world did not change. He turned time into something countable, turned progress into a marked scale, stamped every ordinary day with a timestamp, making them a progress bar he could look back on.
He later meticulously recorded every train journey down to the minute and second, numbered every flight, and marked off visited countries one by one on a list. These things seemed laborious to outsiders, but for him, it was just instinct.
After graduation, he went to a Norwegian software company in Beijing. To save money, he slept on a French colleague's sofa, slept in the office. After work on Friday, he headed straight to the train station, returning Monday morning.
In the year 2007, he traveled 75,900 kilometers by train, equivalent to spending two full months on the road. He recorded every segment of the journey, precise to the minute or even second, posting it on forums. Someone gave him a nickname: Thousand-Trip High-Speed Rail Man.
In 2010, he went abroad for the first time, to Nepal, then India. In India, he boarded the country's longest-running train, the 16317 Himsagar Express, traveling all the way from the southernmost Kanyakumari to Kashmir, spending his entire savings at the time, $1,000.
Launching the F2Pool Bitcoin Mining Pool
In May 2011, he read two articles about Bitcoin on Solidot. That night, he opened the Bitcoin Wiki and read it from start to finish all night long. He described the feeling as if he had discovered a new continent.
On May 28, he bought his first bitcoin at a unit price of $8.70, borrowed $40,000 from his father, went to Zhongguancun to buy two graphics cards, rented four civilian houses, equipped dozens of mining rigs, second-hand motherboards, 512MB RAM, 4GB USB drives installed with Ubuntu, and started mining like that.
In the first two years, he mined 7,700 bitcoins, used 4,000 to pay for electricity, exchanged 660 for an iPhone (which was stolen in the St. Petersburg metro station). He sold the rest in January 2013 at $17 each, repaid his father's money, and made a small profit of over ten thousand dollars.
In April of that year, he and Mao Shixing, online nickname 'Shenyu' (which means 'Magic Fish'), launched F2Pool in Wenzhou, the first Bitcoin mining pool in China, later familiarly known as 'Fish Pool'.
Wang Chun wrote the backend code, Shenyu handled operations. A mining pool is different from a mining farm; a farm mines for itself, while a pool organizes the computing power of global miners, distributes rewards based on contribution, charges a handling fee, more like infrastructure for the Bitcoin network.
After going online, the pool expanded rapidly. This infrastructure business brought continuous cash flow and became an important source of his long-term wealth. Over the past decade-plus, F2Pool has helped global miners cumulatively mine over 1.3 million bitcoins.
In 2015, he used 2,900 bitcoins to buy his first apartment in Pattaya, Thailand. In 2018, he founded stake.fish in Thailand, a PoS staking service. This company later supported over twenty public chains including Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, managing assets exceeding $3 billion.
The PoW mining pool and PoS validation, two infrastructure businesses based on different technological routes, together formed the foundation of his wealth. It is widely estimated that Wang Chun's wealth has reached hundreds of millions of dollars, but the specific figure has never been disclosed.
Flying into Space, Overlooking the Poles
On-paper wealth grew, but his lifestyle hardly changed: writing code, traveling, counting.
In December 2021, he stood at the South Pole. In July 2023, the North Pole. All geographical poles on Earth had been reached; there were no farther endpoints left, yet the questing heart did not stop.
It was then that he saw SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster landing vertically back on the launch pad. He felt that feeling again, exactly like the first time he heard about computers, the first time he discovered Bitcoin.
On April 23, 2023, lying in a hotel bed in Saudi Arabia, he asked himself: if he could design his own mission, where would he fly? The poles were the final frontier, but since 1961 when humans entered space, almost all crewed spacecraft had operated in mid-to-low inclination orbits. No vessel had ever truly flown over the poles, not because it couldn't be done, but because no one thought to do it, or no one had the resources to do it.
He thought of Darwin's HMS Beagle, the Beagle 2 Mars lander named after it, and then he thought of the Fram, the Norwegian exploration ship that conquered the poles multiple times, meaning 'Forward' in Norwegian.
So he planned and designed everything, submitted a private mission proposal to SpaceX, requesting to charter an entire Crew Dragon, enter orbit at a 90-degree polar inclination, and fly over the poles.
The entire mission was fully self-funded, no sponsors. No brokers, no NASA approvals. He treated SpaceX as a charter company, negotiated requirements and costs, became the mission commander himself, fully responsible for overall decisions, coordinating the crew, and interfacing with ground control.
He deliberately chose the crew too: a Norwegian, a German, an Australian, all non-American citizens, because this was a purely private decision.
SpaceX sent him 2.8GB of learning materials, including mission procedure manuals, spacecraft system operation documents, guides for 22 scientific experiments, and explanations of polar orbit-specific risks.
Over the next 8 months, he underwent rigorous training: centrifuge high-G training, parabolic microgravity flights, cabin pressure loss simulation, polar survival drills, unassisted autonomous egress training, and more.
On March 31, 2025, the Falcon 9 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center.
Day one, the whole crew experienced space motion sickness. Day two, he wrote: feeling completely fine, like starting over.
The pole came into view, and he sent a message: Hello, Antarctica. Looking down from 430 kilometers high, a pure white expanse, no signs of human activity visible.
Suspended above Earth, he thought of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, modeling his situation using quantum mechanics.
In three and a half days, the Fram2 mission completed 22 scientific experiments, including the first X-ray image taken in space by humans, growing oyster mushrooms in microgravity, monitoring polar radiation data, photographing auroras......
On April 4, 2025, the Crew Dragon splashed down off the coast of California. This was humanity's first crewed polar orbit flight, with an inclination of 90.01 degrees, breaking the 65-degree record set by the Soviet Union's Vostok 6 in 1963.
Mars Flyby
After Fram2's success, Wang Chun was already in line for SpaceX's next, even grander project.
In May 2026, on the eve of SpaceX's live broadcast of the Starship V3's first launch test, the camera cut to Bouvet Island, where Wang Chun formally announced he would command the Starship to execute humanity's first crewed interplanetary flight mission: leaving the Earth-Moon system, flying by Mars, and returning to Earth, expected to take two years.
Before that, he would also complete the first commercial Starship lunar flyby mission with Dennis Tito and his wife, flying by within 200 kilometers of the lunar surface, as a warm-up for the official mission.
Twenty years ago, ordinary people had no chance to participate in deep space missions. Between 2001 and 2009, only seven extremely wealthy private individuals paid to hitch a ride to the International Space Station via Russian spacecraft, each trip costing around $20 million and requiring strict qualification review.
SpaceX changed the underlying structure of this logic. Reusable rockets lowered costs, private individuals could directly charter an entire spacecraft, mission forms shifted from brief visits to the space station to free-flight, allowing custom orbits, experiments, and crew selection.
Wang Chun's Fram2 was the first privately customized crewed polar orbit mission, and this Starship Mars flyby is humanity's first privately funded crewed interplanetary mission, with communication delays up to 20 minutes, no quick return windows, no possibility of rescue, the entire mission handled by SpaceX, unrelated to NASA.
The Continuously Expanding Map
Bitcoin played a special role in this change, creating a path for wealth accumulation not attached to the traditional financial system, and this wealth is flowing in some way towards the boundaries of civilization's expansion.
Wang Chun used mining-accumulated capital to charter the polar orbit, used mining pool operating profits to wait for Starship. It's not mere wealth consumption, but investing the resources Bitcoin gave him into the direction he's been oriented towards since he was five years old.
Over the past few decades, crewed spaceflight has long been dominated by national systems. Who could go up, where to go, what to do, was basically decided by space agencies.
Now, a programmer from Tianjin can define his own mission, choose his own orbit, be his own commander, and decide to fly by the side of Mars.
The counting continues, just on a map with a larger scale.
