Chun Wang: f2pool Bitcoin Miner Who Became an Astronaut

Chun Wang's life reads like something a novelist would reject for being too far-fetched. The Fram2 mission commander and f2pool co-founder went from borrowing $40,000 from his father to mine Bitcoin on a MacBook, to funding an entire SpaceX polar orbit flight with his own cryptocurrency holdings — then commanding it. On March 31, 2025, Wang lifted off from Kennedy Space Center aboard a Crew Dragon Resilience, flying a trajectory no crewed mission had ever attempted: a 90-degree retrograde orbit passing directly over both poles.

A World Map, a 486 SX, and an Obsession With Discovery

Born in 1982 in Tianjin, China, Wang traces his wanderlust to a single object: a world map his grandfather brought home when Wang was five years old. That map lit something in him that never went out. Computers arrived next — he heard about them at seven, owned his first 486 SX running MS-DOS by age 13, and quickly learned to code games and planetary gravity simulations. Formal education took him through programming contests but not to a degree — he dropped out and bounced between software jobs across China.

Bitcoin found him in May 2011, via two articles on the Chinese tech site Solidot. Wang spent the entire night reading through the Bitcoin wiki. That night changed everything.

He borrowed $40,000 from his father, fired up a MacBook at 800 khash/s, then bought GPUs in Zhongguancun to scale up. Over his first two years mining, Wang personally accumulated 7,700 BTC — netting roughly 2,700 after power costs. He sold most of his stack in January 2013 at $11 per coin to repay the loan. Classic early Bitcoin story: maximum effort, minimum price, zero regret.

Driven by curiosity, I opened the wiki link on en.bitcoin.it and studied it for one night. I finally understood everything, and it was like the discovery of the New World.

Building f2pool: How One Pool Controlled a Third of Bitcoin

In April 2013, Chun Wang teamed up with Mao Shihang — known online as Discus Fish — and co-founded f2pool out of Wenzhou. Wang coded the backend; Discus Fish ran operations. The pool launched on May 5, 2013 and quickly scaled to the top — at its peak, f2pool controlled roughly one-third of Bitcoin's total hashrate. That's not a niche operation. That's infrastructure on a civilizational scale.

To this day, f2pool has mined over 1.3 million BTC — more than 9 percent of every block ever produced in Bitcoin's history. Wang kept it running through a decade of industry shifts, including navigating China's 2021 mining crackdown that pushed the operation offshore.

During the 2017 block-size wars, f2pool's role was quiet but decisive. Wang later said: "Proof-of-work is the constitution of Bitcoin. Without miners' support, we wouldn't have had SegWit activated, and we wouldn't have made the Lightning Network possible." The historical record backs that up entirely.

Wang didn't stop there. A 2017 conversation with Vitalik Buterin about proof-of-stake led him to launch stake.fish in 2018 — a non-custodial staking service that became one of the largest validators across Ethereum, Polkadot, Solana, and other networks. He saw the multi-chain future early and built for it instead of arguing about it.

Proof-of-work is the constitution of Bitcoin. Please respect mining and respect the miners. Without miners' support, we wouldn't have had SegWit activated, and we wouldn't have made the Lightning Network possible.

What Made the Fram2 Mission Historic?

Who flew on the Fram2 polar orbit mission?

The Fram2 mission launched on March 31, 2025 aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience on a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center. Wang funded the entire flight himself — by selling Bitcoin. No government money, no corporate sponsors. Just a Bitcoin miner cashing out to buy a seat in history, then commanding it.

The orbit itself was genuinely unprecedented. At a 90-degree retrograde inclination, Fram2 passed directly over both poles — something no crewed spacecraft had ever done. The previous record for crewed polar proximity was 65 degrees, set on the Soviet Vostok 6 flight in 1963. Over sixty years passed before anyone cleared that bar. Wang flew an all-civilian crew of first-time astronauts:

The mission ran three and a half days with no International Space Station docking. The primary objectives were polar Earth observation and 22 research experiments — including the first human X-ray in space (a hand scan deliberately echoing Roentgen's original 1895 image), oyster mushroom cultivation for Mars food research under the name "Mission MushVroom," female hormone tracking, radiation monitoring, blood-flow restriction testing, mobile MRI scans, and sleep tracking.

One scientific finding stood out: radiation data showed the South Atlantic Anomaly — not the polar regions — delivered the highest radiation dose to the crew. The polar orbit actually reduced the crew's time in that high-radiation zone compared to standard ISS paths. Wang shared radiation graphs confirming this result in March 2026. Full scientific papers from the 22 experiments had not yet been published at that point.

Hello, Antarctica. From four hundred sixty kilometers up, it's only pure white — no human activity visible.

• Jannicke Mikkelsen — Norwegian filmmaker and polar explorer, vehicle commander
• Rabea Rogge — German robotics researcher, pilot
• Eric Philips — Australian polar explorer, mission specialist
• Chun Wang — mission commander

What Happens When a Bitcoin Miner Runs Out of Frontiers?

Apparently, he goes to space — then keeps going. Wang's obsession with exploration didn't start with Fram2; that was just the highest peak so far. His X profile documents an ongoing mission to visit every territory on Earth following ISO 3166, and as of March 2026 he's at 150 out of 249 territories — roughly 60 percent of the planet, clocked across more than 1,153 flights averaging 36 per year.

His 150th territory was Bouvet Island — one of the most remote, uninhabited places on Earth — reached via ship and helicopter in March 2026. Wang spent 201 hours on the ice before heading to Cape Town. That's not a collector's stamp on a passport. That's commitment.

Back in orbit, Wang described re-entry with more poetry than you'd expect from a backend engineer. Hovering above a rotating Earth, he kept circling back to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle from 1927 — the idea that position only makes sense when you consider momentum alongside it. He was thinking, almost certainly, about the Crew Dragon and Earth simultaneously hurtling through space, their eventual meeting entirely dependent on engineers getting the math exactly right.

Zero-G had its lighter moments. Wang accidentally released a small stuffed polar bear and watched it drift. Day one brought space motion sickness for the whole crew — "it felt different from motion sickness in a car or at sea" — but by day two it was entirely gone. Wang, still logging flights and posting dispatches from remote corners of the Earth, shows no signs of slowing down. The Bitcoin miner who stayed curious enough to go to space is still asking what comes next.