From OG Bitcoin Miner to Astronaut

On March 31, 2025, Chun Wang, the founder of the historic Bitcoin mining pool f2pool, presented as the mission manager of Fram2—the first manned spacecraft to enter Earth’s orbit. SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience took off from the Kennedy Space Center on a Falcon 9 rocket and entered a 90-degree reverse orbit that passed directly over the North and South Poles. No previous crewed mission had reached this route; the previous highest inclination for humans in orbit was 65 degrees on the Soviet Vostok 6 flight in 1963.

In an exclusive interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Wang shared one of his most memorable moments in space: “I don’t remember much from the time I was in space, but when I looked at the Earth orbiting below, I kept thinking: we are flying so fast, how is it possible to return to the ground? And with what I learned about the uncertainty principle,” he added, referring to Heisenberg’s 1927 theory of physics, which states that there is a natural limit to certain pairs of quantum properties that cannot be known how at the same time. The most popular pair is position (x) and momentum (p, which is velocity times mass).

He continued, “Δx ⋅ Δp ≥ ℏ/2: position only makes sense if you consider momentum as well. Both determine whether two objects can really ‘meet’. Here, distance is not just a difference in position vectors; velocity vectors must be considered, too.” the big ones.

Wang led an all-citizen team of first-ever astronauts: motorist Jannicke Mikkelsen, a Norwegian filmmaker and environmental explorer, pilot Rabea Rogge, a German robotics researcher, and mechanical engineer Eric Philips, an Australian temperate explorer. The mission lasted three and a half days without stopping the International Space Station. The main objectives were to observe the temperate world and to conduct 22 research studies.

Space may have been Wang’s most extreme travel destination, but it was far from the first. Wang is on a self-proclaimed mission to visit every place in the world, described on his X profile as “I document my travels to every country/place in the world according to ISO 3166: 60% (150 out of 249) on one planet/month/month done and counting.” To date, he boasts more than 1153 different flights around the world, an average of 36 per year, including many recent visits to Antarctica and temperate regions.

Wang was not always such an active traveler. Born in 1982 in Tianjin, China, Wang was five years old when his grandfather brought home a map of the world that sparked a lifelong obsession with exploration, but it wasn’t until adulthood that he began traveling the world, after building a famous career as the first Bitcoin miner and pool operator. Computers entered his life early: he heard about them at the age of seven and owned his first 486 SX running MS-DOS at 13. He learned to code games and planetary gravity simulations. University followed programming competitions, but he dropped out without a degree and moved between software jobs across China.

Bitcoin entered his world in May 2011. Wang saw two articles on the Chinese technology site Solidot and spent the night reading the Bitcoin wiki. “Driven by curiosity, I opened the wiki link on en.bitcoin.it and read overnight. Finally I understood everything, and it was like the discovery of a New World,” he wrote in his 2015 books. He borrowed $40,000 from his father, mined with a MacBook at 800 khash/s, then scaled with GPUs bought from Zhongguancun. In the first two years, he personally mined 7,700 BTC, netting about 2,700 after energy costs. He sold the lot in January 2013 for $11 to pay off a loan.

The first GPU mining rigs in China, the kind of setup Chun Wang used before founding f2pool. (Credit: official f2pool history)

In April 2013 Wang co-founded f2pool with Mao Shihang, known online as Discus Fish. They stopped at Wenzhou. Wang code backend; Discus Fish managed by jobs. The pool was launched on May 5 and quickly grew to control nearly one-third of Bitcoin’s hashrate at its peak.

To date, f2pool has mined more than 1.3 million BTC, more than 9 percent of all blocks ever produced. It remains one of the largest pools and longest running mines in Bitcoin history. During the block-size wars of 2017, the pool played a quiet but decisive role supporting Nakamoto’s Bitcoin consensus. Wang later said: “Proof of work is the constitution of Bitcoin. Please respect the mines and respect the miners. Without the support of the miners, we would not have made SegWit work, and we would not have made the Lightning Network possible.”

From 2014 to the early 2020s, Wang kept f2pool running while navigating industry shifts, including a 2021 Chinese mining bust that pushed operations offshore. In 2017, he discussed the upcoming season of stake testimony with Vitalik Buterin. That conversation led him to launch stake.fish in 2018, a staking service that not only ended up being one of the largest validators on Ethereum, Polkadot, Solana, and other networks. This move separated his infrastructure business from the broader crypto industry, bringing his experience as a key player in the rapidly changing crypto market.

In the month

Chun Wang (far right) inside the Crew Dragon capsule with the Fram2 crew, bound for launch. (Credit: SpaceX via Space.com)

The next frontier was space. Wang had set up a private polar-orbit mission on SpaceX starting in 2023. He financed the entire Fram2 flight by selling Bitcoin. There are no sponsors or government support. The team trained for eight months on simulators in California, doing high-G spins, zero-G flights, emergency exercises, and polar survival prep.

The launch came on April 1, 2025, from the Kennedy Space Center. Wang ordered from the commander’s seat. “The trip to orbit was much smoother than I expected. Except for the last minute before SECO, I didn’t feel any G-forces – it honestly felt like another plane,” he wrote. Zero-g was only noticed when he accidentally released a small stuffed bear, and it began to float. The first day brought motion sickness to the entire crew. “It felt different from motion sickness in the car or at the beach. You can still read on your iPad without making it worse. But even drinking a little water can upset your stomach.”