Article by Binance News
On May 21, 2026, during the global live stream of SpaceX Starship V3’s launch, Wang Chun, co-founder of F2Pool, standing on the remote Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic, announced that he would soon command the Starship on humanity’s first crewed interplanetary mission, flying by Mars.
Many people know F2Pool, which has mined over 1.3 million bitcoins, accounting for more than 9% of all Bitcoin blocks in human history and once controlled one-third of the network's total hash rate at its peak.
The funds directed toward Mars primarily came from over a decade of mining pool fee income accumulated since he launched F2Pool in 2013, as well as wealth generated from his 2018 founding of the stake.fish PoS business.
His X homepage is continuously updated with a record: following the ISO 3166 standard, he has documented travels to every country and territory in the world, and has now explored 60% of the 249 celestial bodies (150 out of 249)—still ongoing…
Large gaps on the map
In 1987, Wang Chun’s grandfather brought home a discarded world map. Wang Chun knelt down, captivated by the vast blank space at the bottom of the map, near the polar regions. At just five years old, spending most of his time with his grandparents and rarely traveling far, he was already deeply drawn to those distant, unknown places.
At age 13, after finishing elementary school, he saved up to buy his first 486SX computer and wrote a planetary gravity simulator, watching the orbits of the solar system unfold on the screen.
On the first day he registered for QQ in middle school, he set his username to "1." The next day, he changed it to "2," then "3" the following day, incrementing by one each day. He continued this pattern for nearly seven years, counting all the way up to 2523, until one day he simply got bored and stopped.
There was no special reason to start, and no particular reason to stop, so the number remained there forever. Later, the "2" in F2Pool's name came from this QQ number.
Although this habit has stopped, his way of understanding the world has not changed. He turns time into something countable, progress into measurable markers, stamps each ordinary day with a timestamp, and turns them into a progress bar he can look back on.
He later meticulously recorded every train journey down to the second, noted every flight number, and carefully marked off each country he visited. To outsiders, these tasks seemed laborious, but to him, they were second nature.
After graduation, he joined a Norwegian software company in Beijing. To save money, he slept on the couch of his French colleague and even in the office. He headed straight to the train station after work on Fridays and returned on Monday mornings.
In 2007, he traveled 75,900 kilometers by train—equivalent to spending two full months on the road. He documented every journey, recording times down to the minute and even the second, and posted them on forums. Someone gave him the nickname "High-Speed Rail Thousand-Trip Man."
In 2010, he traveled abroad for the first time, going to Nepal and then India. In India, he boarded the country’s longest-running train, the 16317 Himalayan Ocean Express, traveling from Kanyakumari at the southernmost tip all the way to Kashmir, spending his entire savings of $1,000.
Start F2Pool Bitcoin Mining Pool
In May 2011, he came across two articles about Bitcoin on Solidot. That night, he opened the Bitcoin Wiki and read through 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 $8.70 per coin, borrowed $40,000 from his father, went to Zhongguancun to purchase two graphics cards, rented four residential units, set up dozens of mining rigs, used second-hand motherboards, 512MB of RAM, and a 4GB USB drive to install the Ubuntu system, and began mining.
In the first two years, he mined 7,700 bitcoins; 4,000 were used to pay for electricity, 660 were exchanged for an iPhone, and the rest were stolen at a St. Petersburg subway station. He sold the remainder in January 2013 at $17 each, repaid his father, and made a profit of over ten thousand dollars.
In April of that year, he and Mao Shixing, known online as Shen Yu, launched F2Pool in Wenzhou—the now-famous Fish Pool, China’s first Bitcoin mining pool.
Wang Chun writes backend code, while Shen Yu handles operations. A mining pool is different from a mining farm: a mining farm involves mining independently, whereas a mining pool organizes the computational power of miners worldwide, distributes rewards according to contribution, and charges a fee—making it more like infrastructure for the Bitcoin network.
After the pool launched, it expanded rapidly, generating consistent cash flow from this infrastructure business and becoming a major source of his long-term wealth. Over the past decade, F2Pool has helped miners worldwide mine over 1.3 million bitcoins in total.
In 2015, he used 2,900 bitcoins to purchase his first apartment in Pattaya, Thailand. In 2018, he founded stake.fish in Thailand, offering PoS staking services. The company later supported over twenty blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, and Cosmos, managing assets exceeding $3 billion.
PoW mining pools and PoS validation—two distinct technological approaches—form the foundation of his wealth. Outside observers generally estimate that Wang Chun’s fortune has reached hundreds of millions of dollars, though the exact figure has never been disclosed.
Fly into space and look down at the North and South Poles
Wealth on paper is growing, but lifestyle has barely changed: coding, traveling, counting.
In December 2021, he stood at the South Pole. In July 2023, he reached the North Pole. He has now visited all of Earth’s geographic poles—there is no farther physical destination—but his spirit of exploration knows no bounds.
At that moment, he saw SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster land vertically back on the launchpad. He felt that same sensation again—the exact same feeling he had when he first heard about computers and when he first 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 are the final frontier, but since humans entered space in 1961, nearly all crewed spacecraft have operated in low to mid-latitude orbits, and none have ever flown directly over the North or South Poles—not because it’s impossible, but because no one thought to do it, or no one had the resources to try.
He thought of Darwin’s HMS Beagle, of the Beagle2 Mars probe named after it, and then of Fram, the Norwegian exploration ship that repeatedly conquered the North and South Poles, whose name means “forward” in Norwegian.
He planned and designed everything, submitting a private mission proposal to SpaceX to charter the entire Dragon spacecraft for an orbit with a 90-degree polar inclination, flying over the North and South Poles.
The entire mission was self-funded with no sponsorship, no brokers, and no NASA approval. He treated SpaceX as a charter company, negotiated his requirements and costs, served as mission commander, and took full responsibility for all decisions, crew coordination, and communication with ground control.
The crew was also deliberately chosen—Norwegians, Germans, Australians—all non-American, because this was a purely private decision.
SpaceX sent him 2.8 GB of learning materials, including mission procedure manuals, spacecraft systems operation documents, guidelines for 22 scientific experiments, and specific risk assessments for polar orbits.
Over the next eight months, he underwent a series of rigorous training programs, including centrifuge high-G training, parabolic weightless flights, cabin depressurization simulations, polar survival exercises, and unassisted autonomous spacewalks.
On March 31, 2025, Falcon 9 launched from Kennedy Space Center.
On the first day, everyone in the group experienced space sickness; on the second day, he wrote: "Feeling completely better, like starting anew."
Polar regions came into view; he sent a message: "Hello, Antarctica." From 430 kilometers above, a pristine white expanse stretched out, with no sign of human activity.
Hovering above Earth, he thought of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, modeling his situation using quantum mechanics.
Over three and a half days, the Fram2 mission completed 22 scientific experiments, including the first-ever space-based X-ray image, cultivating oyster mushrooms in microgravity, monitoring polar radiation data, and capturing aurora phenomena.
On April 4, 2025, the Crew Dragon splashed down off the coast of California. This was the first crewed polar orbit mission in human history, with an inclination of 90.01 degrees, breaking the 65-degree record set by the Soviet Vostok 6 in 1963.
Flyby of Mars
After the success of Fram2, Wang Chun has joined SpaceX's next, even more ambitious lineup.
In May 2026, just before SpaceX's live broadcast of the Starship V3's first launch test, the camera cut to Bouvet Island, where Wang Chun officially announced that he would command Starship on humanity's first crewed interstellar mission: departing the Earth-Moon system, flying past Mars, and returning to Earth, estimated to take two years.
Prior to this, he will also complete the Starship’s first commercial lunar flyby alongside Dennis and Tatiana Tito, passing 200 kilometers above the Moon’s surface as a rehearsal for the official mission.
Twenty years ago, ordinary people had no opportunity to participate in deep-space missions. Between 2001 and 2009, only seven extremely wealthy private individuals, each paying approximately $20 million and undergoing rigorous qualification reviews, traveled to the International Space Station aboard Russian spacecraft.
SpaceX transformed the underlying logic of this system: reusable rockets reduced costs, allowing private entities to charter entire spacecraft; mission formats shifted from brief visits to the space station to free-flying missions with customizable orbits, experiments, and crews.
Wang Chun's Fram2 is the first privately customized crewed mission to a polar orbit, while this Starship Mars flyby marks the first privately funded crewed interplanetary mission in human history, with communication delays of up to 20 minutes, no rapid return window, and no possibility of rescue—all managed by SpaceX, with no involvement from NASA.
Expanding map
Bitcoin has played a unique role in this transformation, creating a path to wealth accumulation independent of the traditional financial system, and this wealth is flowing in some way toward the frontiers of civilization.
Wang Chun used capital accumulated from mining to secure a polar orbit, waiting for the starship with revenue from his mining pool—not merely consuming wealth, but channeling the resources Bitcoin gave him toward the path he had been pursuing since the age of five.
For decades, human spaceflight has been dominated by national systems, with space agencies deciding who could go, where they could go, and what they could do.
Now, a programmer from Tianjin can define their own tasks, choose their own path, and act as the mission commander, deciding to fly beside Mars.
The counting continues, but on a larger map.