Written by: Bilibili News
On May 21, 2026, during the global launch livestream of SpaceX Starship V3, Wang Chun, co-founder of F2Pool, stood on Bouvet Island, the most remote island in the South Atlantic, and announced that he would soon command Starship to carry out the first manned interplanetary flight mission to fly past Mars.
Many people know F2Pool, a mining pool that has mined more than 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 network's computing power.
The funds that flew to Mars mainly came from the mining pool fee income he accumulated over more than ten years after launching F2Pool in 2013, as well as the wealth brought by founding the stake.fish PoS business in 2018.
His X homepage is constantly being updated: following the ISO 3166 standard, he records his travels to every country and region in the world, and has currently completed exploration of 60% of one celestial body (150 out of 249), and is still being updated...
The huge blank space on the map
In 1987, Wang Chun's grandfather brought home a world map he had found. Wang Chun lay down on it and was drawn to the huge blank space at the bottom of the map, representing the polar region. He was five years old at the time, and spent most of his time with his grandparents, rarely traveling far from home, yet he was already deeply fascinated by those distant and unknown places.
After graduating from elementary school at the age of 13, he saved up money to buy his first 486SX computer. He wrote a planetary gravity simulator for himself and watched the movement of the solar system in front of the monitor.
On the first day he registered for QQ in junior high school, he set his name to 1. The next day he changed it to 2, the third day to 3, and so on, increasing it every day for nearly seven years, until he reached 2523, until one day he got bored and stopped.
There was no particular reason for starting, nor any particular reason for stopping, and in the end, this number remained there forever. Later, the 2 in the name F2Pool came from this QQ number.
Although this habit ceased, his way of understanding the world remained unchanged. He turned time into something countable, progress into a markable scale, and stamped each ordinary day with a timestamp, making them a progress bar that could be looked back on.
He later meticulously recorded every train journey down to the second, numbered every flight, and marked each country he visited on a list. What seemed laborious to outsiders was simply instinctive to him.
After graduation, he went to work for a Norwegian software company in Beijing. To save money, he slept on his French colleagues' sofas and in the office. He would go straight to the train station after get off work on Fridays and return on Monday mornings.
In 2007, he traveled 75,900 kilometers by train, which was equivalent to spending two whole months on the road. He recorded every step of his journey, down to the minute and even the second, and posted the records on forums. Someone gave him a nickname: "The Man Who Travels a Thousand Times on High-Speed Rail."
In 2010, he traveled abroad for the first time, visiting Nepal and then India. In India, he boarded the country's longest train, the 16317 Snow Mountain Current Express, traveling from Kanyakumari at the southernmost tip all the way to Kashmir, spending all his savings at the time, $1,000.
Start F2Pool Bitcoin mining pool
In May 2011, he saw two articles about Bitcoin on Solidot. That night, he opened the Bitcoin Wiki and read it from beginning to end all night. He described the feeling as discovering a new continent.
On May 28, he bought his first Bitcoin at $8.70. He borrowed $40,000 from his father, went to Zhongguancun to buy two graphics cards, rented four houses, and set up dozens of mining machines, second-hand motherboards, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB USB drives with Ubuntu installed. That's how he started mining.
In the first two years, he mined 7,700 bitcoins. He used 4,000 to pay his electricity bill, and 660 to buy an iPhone, which was then stolen in a St. Petersburg metro station. He sold the rest in January 2013 at $17 each, paying off his father's debts and making a small profit of over ten thousand yuan.
In April of that year, he and Mao Shixing, whose online name was Shenyu, launched F2Pool in Wenzhou, which later became known as FishPool, the first Bitcoin mining pool in China.
Wang Chun writes the backend code, while Shenyu handles operations. Mining pools are different from mining farms. Mining farms mine by themselves, while mining pools organize the computing power of miners worldwide, distribute revenue according to contribution, and collect transaction fees. They are more like the infrastructure of the Bitcoin network.
After its launch, the pool expanded rapidly. This infrastructure business generated a continuous cash flow and became an important source of his long-term wealth. Over the past decade, F2Pool has helped miners worldwide mine more than 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, providing PoS staking services. This company later supported more than 20 public blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, and Cosmos, managing assets exceeding $3 billion.
PoW mining pools and PoS verification, two infrastructure businesses with different technological approaches, together form the foundation of his wealth. It is widely estimated that Wang Chun's wealth has reached hundreds of millions of US dollars, but the specific figure has never been disclosed.
Fly into space and overlook the North and South Poles
The paper wealth is growing, but the lifestyle remains almost unchanged: writing code, traveling, and counting.
In December 2021, he stood at the South Pole. In July 2023, at the North Pole. He had reached all the geographical poles on Earth, and there was no further end in sight, but his desire to explore had no end.
Just then, he saw SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster descend vertically back to the launch pad. He felt that same feeling again, exactly the same as when he first heard about computers or discovered Bitcoin.
On April 23, 2023, lying in his hotel bed in Saudi Arabia, he asked himself, if he could design his own mission, where would he fly? The polar regions are the last frontier, but since humans entered space in 1961, almost all manned spacecraft have been operating in low-latitude orbits. No one has ever actually flown over the North and South Poles. It's not that it's impossible, but that no one has thought of doing it, or no one has the resources to do it.
He thought of Darwin's Beagle, the Mars probe named after it, and then he thought of Fram, the Norwegian expedition ship that had conquered the North and South Poles many times, which means "forward" in Norwegian.
So he planned and designed everything, submitted a private mission proposal to SpaceX, and requested to charter the entire Dragon spacecraft to enter orbit at a 90-degree polar inclination and fly over the North and South Poles.
The entire mission was self-funded, without any sponsorship. There was no agent or NASA approval. He treated SpaceX like a charter company, negotiated the requirements and costs, and acted as the mission commander, taking full responsibility for overall decision-making, crew coordination, and communication with ground control.
He also deliberately chose the crew members: Norwegians, Germans, and Australians, none of whom were American citizens, because it was a purely personal decision.
SpaceX sent him 2.8GB of learning materials, including mission procedure manuals, spacecraft system operation documents, 22 scientific experiment guidelines, and a description of the unique risks of polar orbit.
Over the next eight months, he underwent a series of rigorous training programs, including high-G centrifuge training, parabolic weightlessness flight, cabin depressurization simulation, polar survival drills, and unassisted autonomous extravehicular activity.
On March 31, 2025, the Falcon 9 will launch from the Kennedy Space Center.
On the first day, everyone in the group experienced space motion sickness. On the second day, he wrote: "I feel completely better, like starting over."
The polar regions came into view, and he sent a message: Hello, Antarctica. From 430 kilometers above, it was a pure white expanse, with no human activity in sight.
Suspended above the Earth, he thought of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and used quantum mechanics to model his situation.
In three and a half days, the Fram2 mission completed 22 scientific experiments, including the first-ever X-ray in space, cultivating oyster mushrooms in microgravity, monitoring polar radiation data, and photographing the aurora borealis...
On April 4, 2025, the Dragon spacecraft splashed down off the coast of California. This marked the first manned polar orbital flight in human history, with an inclination of 90.01 degrees, breaking the record of 65 degrees set by the Soviet Union's Vostok 6 in 1963.
Flying past Mars
Following the success of Fram2, Wang Chun has been placed in SpaceX's next, even more ambitious mission.
In May 2026, on the eve of SpaceX's live broadcast of the first launch test of Starship V3, the camera cut to Bouvet Island, where Wang Chun officially announced that he would command Starship to carry out the first manned interplanetary flight mission in human history: to fly out of the Earth-Moon system, fly past Mars, and return to Earth, which was expected to take two years.
Prior to this, he will also complete Starship's first commercial lunar flyby with Dennis Tito and his wife, passing 200 kilometers above 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 hitchhiked to the International Space Station on Russian spacecraft, each trip costing approximately $20 million and requiring rigorous qualification screening.
SpaceX has changed the underlying structure of this logic. Reusable rockets have reduced costs, and private individuals can directly charter an entire spacecraft. Missions have changed from short visits to the space station to free flights, allowing for customized orbits, experiments, and crews.
Wang Chun's Fram2 was the first privately commissioned manned mission to polar orbit, while this Starship Mars flyby is the first privately funded manned interplanetary mission in human history. The communication delay was as far as 20 minutes, there was no fast return window, and there was no possibility of rescue. The entire mission was handled by SpaceX and had nothing to do with NASA.
The ever-expanding map
Bitcoin plays a unique role in this change, creating a path to wealth accumulation that is independent of the traditional financial system, and this wealth is somehow flowing toward the boundaries of civilization's expansion.
Wang Chun used the capital accumulated from mining to book polar orbit and used the profits from operating the mining pool to wait for the starship. This was not simply a matter of wealth consumption, but rather an investment of the resources that Bitcoin had given him in the direction he had been pursuing since he was 5 years old.
For decades, manned spaceflight has been dominated by the national system, with the decision of who goes up, where they go, and what they do largely determined by space agencies.
Now, a programmer from Tianjin can define his own mission, choose his own trajectory, and act as the commander himself, deciding to fly to the vicinity of Mars.
The counting continues, only now on a larger map.
