Wang Chun used the capital accumulated from mining to charter polar orbits, waiting for the starship with the income from the mining pool, not merely for wealth consumption, but to invest the resources that Bitcoin provided him into the direction he has been pursuing since he was 5 years old.

Written by: Bibi News

On May 21, 2026, during the global launch live broadcast of SpaceX's Starship V3, Wang Chun, co-founder of F2Pool, announced on the remote Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic that he would soon command Starship to execute humanity's first manned interstellar mission, flying past Mars.

Many people know F2Pool, a mining pool that has mined over 1.3 million Bitcoins, accounting for more than 9% of all Bitcoin blocks in human history, and at its peak controlled one-third of the total network hashrate.

The funds flying to Mars mainly come from the mining pool fee income accumulated over more than a decade since he launched F2Pool in 2013, and the wealth generated from the stake.fish PoS business he founded in 2018.

His X homepage continuously updates a record: according to ISO 3166 standards, documenting trips to every country and region in the world, currently completing 60% of exploring one celestial body (150 out of 249), still being updated...

A Huge Blank on the Map

In 1987, Wang Chun's grandfather brought back a found world map. Wang Chun leaned down, attracted by the large blank area at the bottom of the map in the polar regions. At that time, he was 5 years old, mostly living with his grandparents, rarely going far, yet already deeply fascinated by those distant and unknown places.

At 13, after graduating from elementary school, he saved money to buy his first 486SX, on which he wrote a planetary gravity simulator, watching the motion trajectories of the solar system on the screen.

On the first day he registered for QQ, he set his name to 1. The next day he changed it to 2, the third day 3, and so on, incrementing each day for nearly seven years, counting all the way to 2523, until one day he felt bored and stopped.

There was no particular reason to start, and no special reason to stop; ultimately, this number remained forever, and later the '2' in F2Pool's name 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 markable scale, timestamping each ordinary day, turning them into a progress bar to refer back to.

Later, he accurately recorded every train journey down to the seconds, numbered each flight, and annotated the countries he visited on a list. While these tasks might seem laborious to outsiders, to him it was simply instinct.

After graduation, he joined a Norwegian software company in Beijing. To save money, he slept on the couch of a French colleague and even in the office. He rushed to the train station right after work on Friday and returned Monday morning.

In 2007, he took trains for 75,900 kilometers, equivalent to spending a full two months on the road. He documented every journey down to the minutes and even seconds, posting them on forums. People nicknamed him: the train travel thousand times man.

In 2010, he went abroad for the first time, traveling to Nepal and then India. In India, he boarded the longest running train in that country, the 16317 class "Snow Mountain Ocean Current Express," riding from Kanyakumari at the southernmost point all the way to Kashmir, exhausting all his savings at the time, 1,000 dollars.

Launching the F2Pool Bitcoin Mining Pool

In May 2011, he saw two articles about Bitcoin on Solidot. That night, he opened 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 price of 8.7 dollars, borrowed 40,000 dollars from his father, rushed to Zhongguancun to buy two graphics cards, rented four apartments, equipped dozens of mining machines, second-hand motherboards, 512MB memory, and a 4GB USB drive to install Ubuntu, and thus started mining.

In the first two years, he mined 7,700 Bitcoins, paid 4,000 for electricity, and traded 660 for an iPhone, which was stolen at St. Petersburg Metro Station. The remainder was cleared in January 2013 at a price of 17 dollars, repaying his father's money and making a small profit of more than 10,000 dollars.

In April of that year, he and a netizen named "Shen Yu" (Mao Shixiang) launched F2Pool in Wenzhou, which later became known as "Fish Pool," the first Bitcoin mining pool in China.

Wang Chun wrote the backend code, while Shen Yu handled operations. A mining pool is different from a mining farm; a mining farm mines on its own, while a mining pool organizes the hashrate of miners globally and allocates profits according to contributions, collecting fees, more like the infrastructure of the Bitcoin network.

After the pool went online, it rapidly expanded; this infrastructure business brought continuous cash flow and became an important source of his long-term wealth. For over a decade, F2Pool has helped global miners mine over 1.3 million Bitcoins.

In 2015, he bought his first apartment in Pattaya, Thailand, with 2,900 Bitcoins. In 2018, he founded stake.fish in Thailand to provide PoS staking services. This company later supported over twenty public chains, including Ethereum, Solana, and Cosmos, managing an asset scale of over 3 billion dollars.

The PoW mining pool and PoS validation, two different technical routes of infrastructure businesses, jointly form the foundation of his wealth. Externally, it is generally estimated that Wang Chun's wealth has reached hundreds of millions of dollars, but the exact figure has never been disclosed.

Flying into Space, Overlooking the Poles

While his financial wealth was growing, his lifestyle remained nearly unchanged: writing code, traveling, counting.

In December 2021, he stood at the South Pole. In July 2023, at the North Pole. The geographical poles of the Earth have all been reached, no further endpoints exist, yet the spirit of exploration has no limits.

At this moment, he saw SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster landing vertically back at the launch pad. He felt that same sensation, just like when he first learned about computers and first discovered Bitcoin.

On April 23, 2023, lying on a hotel bed in Saudi Arabia, he asked himself, if he could design the mission, where would he fly? The polar regions are the last frontier, but since humans entered space in 1961, almost all manned spacecraft have operated in low to mid-latitude orbits; no spacecraft has actually flown over the North and South Poles—not because it couldn’t be done, but because no one thought to do it or had the resources to do it.

He thought of Darwin's ship, the HMS Beagle, which was named after the Mars probe Beagle2, and then he thought of the Fram, the Norwegian exploration ship that had conquered the North and South Poles multiple times; in Norwegian, it means "to move forward."

Thus, he planned and designed everything, submitting a private mission proposal to SpaceX, requesting to charter an entire Dragon spacecraft to enter orbit at a 90-degree polar inclination, flying over the North and South Poles.

The entire mission was self-funded, with no sponsors. No agent and no NASA approval; he treated SpaceX as a charter company, discussing needs and costs, personally taking the role of mission commander, fully responsible for overall decisions, coordinating the crew, and liaising with the ground control center.

He also deliberately chose the crew: Norwegians, Germans, Australians, all non-American nationals, as this was a purely personal decision.

SpaceX sent him 2.8GB of study materials, including mission procedures manuals, spacecraft system operation documents, guides for 22 scientific experiments, and explanations of risks specific to polar orbits.

Over the next eight months, he underwent a rigorous series of training sessions, including high G training in a centrifuge, parabolic weightlessness flights, cabin depressurization simulations, polar survival drills, and autonomous exit from the cabin without assistance.

On March 31, 2025, the Falcon 9 launched from the Kennedy Space Center.

On the first day, the entire crew experienced space motion sickness; on the second day, he wrote: "I feel fully recovered, like starting anew."

The polar regions came into view, and he sent a message: "Hello, Antarctica." From an altitude of 430 kilometers, all was pure white, with no sign of human activity visible.

Suspended above the 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 space X-ray in human history, growing oyster mushrooms in a microgravity environment, monitoring polar radiation data, capturing aurora phenomena...

On April 4, 2025, the Dragon spacecraft splashed down off the coast of California. This was the first manned polar orbital flight in human history, with an inclination of 90.01 degrees, breaking the 65-degree record set by the Soviet Vostok 6 in 1963.

Flying Past Mars

After the success of Fram2, Wang Chun has entered SpaceX's next grand lineup.

In May 2026, on the eve of the live broadcast of Starship V3's first launch test, the camera cut to Bouvet Island, where Wang Chun officially announced that he would command Starship to execute humanity's first manned interstellar mission: flying outside the Earth-Moon system, flying past Mars, and returning to Earth, with an estimated duration of two years.

Before this, he would also complete Starship's first commercial lunar flyby in conjunction with Dennis Tito and his wife, flying 200 kilometers above the lunar surface as a warm-up for the formal mission.

Twenty years ago, ordinary people had no opportunity to participate in deep space missions. Between 2001 and 2009, only seven extremely wealthy private payers traveled to the International Space Station via Russian spacecraft, each trip costing about 20 million dollars, and they had to pass rigorous qualification assessments.

SpaceX has changed this underlying logic, as reusable rockets have reduced costs, allowing private individuals to charter entire spacecraft directly, transforming mission formats from brief visits to space stations into free flights, enabling customization of orbits, experiments, and crews.

Wang Chun's Fram2 is the first privately customized manned polar orbital mission, while this upcoming Starship flyby of Mars will be the first privately funded manned interstellar mission in human history, with communication delays of up to 20 minutes, no quick return window, and no rescue possibilities; the entire mission is managed by SpaceX, unrelated to NASA.

The Expanding Map

Bitcoin has played a special role in this transformation, creating a path for wealth accumulation that is independent of traditional financial systems, and this wealth is flowing toward the boundaries of expanding civilization in some way.

Wang Chun used the capital accumulated from mining to charter polar orbits, waiting for the starship with the income from the mining pool, not merely for wealth consumption, but to invest the resources that Bitcoin provided him into the direction he has been pursuing since he was 5 years old.

In the past few decades, manned spaceflight has long been dominated by national systems, determining who can go, where to go, and what to do, basically decided by space agencies.

Now, a programmer who came from Tianjin can define the mission himself, choose the orbit himself, and be the commander himself, deciding to fly next to Mars.

The counting continues, but on a much larger scale map.