From OG Bitcoin Miner to Astronaut

Chun Wang’s amazing life: From former Bitcoin miner to astronaut

On March 31, 2025, Chun Wang, co-founder of the historic Bitcoin mining pool f2pool, launched as mission commander of Fram2, the first manned spacecraft to enter polar orbit. SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience launched from Kennedy Space Center on a Falcon 9 rocket and entered a 90-degree retrograde inclined orbit passing directly over the North and South Poles. No previous manned mission had ever achieved this orbit. The highest ever 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 about being in space, but as I looked down at the Earth spinning below me, I just kept thinking: We were flying so fast. “How can we get back to the ground if we’re doing so? The distance itself isn’t really that long, less than 500km, but what’s important is the huge difference in speed. That’s when I remembered what I learned about the uncertainty principle,” he added. It references Heisenberg’s 1927 physical theorem. This theorem states that there is an inherent limit to the precision with which a given pair of physical properties of a quantum particle can be known simultaneously. The most famous pair is position (x) and momentum (p, the product of mass and velocity).

He goes on to say, “Δx ⋅ Δp ≥ ℏ/2: Position only makes sense if we consider momentum together; both determine whether two bodies can actually ‘meet’. Here, distance is not just the difference in position vectors. The velocity vector must also be considered. ” The two objects he was probably considering were the Earth and the Fram2 spacecraft he was on, both of which were moving at incredible speeds and could easily have passed each other for a landing without a good engineer’s brain.

Wang led an all-civilian crew of first-time astronauts. The vehicle is led by Norwegian film director and polar explorer Jannicke Mikkelsen, piloted by German robotics researcher Lavea Rogge, and mission specialist Eric Phillips, an Australian polar explorer. The mission lasted three and a half days without docking to the International Space Station. The main objective was to observe the polar Earth and conduct 22 research experiments.

Space may have been Wang’s most extreme destination, but it wasn’t his first. Mr. Wang is on a self-declared mission to visit every region on Earth, and his X profile describes it as “Documenting travel to every country/region of the world according to ISO 3166: 60% (150 of 249) completed for one planet/moon and still ongoing.” To date, he has completed more than 1,153 various flights around the world, including recent visits to Antarctica and the Polar Regions, averaging 36 flights per year.

But Mr. Wang wasn’t always an avid traveler. Born in Tianjin, China in 1982, Wang was five years old when a world map brought home by his grandfather sparked a lifelong obsession with exploration, but it wasn’t until early adulthood that he began traveling the world after a legendary career as an early Bitcoin miner and pool operator. Computers were introduced early in his life. He heard about computers at age 7, and by age 13 he owned his first 486 SX running MS-DOS. He learned to code games and planetary gravity simulations. In college, he entered programming competitions, but dropped out without earning a degree and moved to software-related jobs throughout 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. “Out of curiosity, I opened the en.bitcoin.it wiki link and studied it all night. I finally understood everything. It was like discovering a new world,” he wrote in his 2015 memoir. He borrowed $40,000 from his father, mined at 800 khash/s on a MacBook, and scaled up with a GPU he bought in Zhongguancun. In the first two years, he personally mined 7,700 $BTCthe profit after electricity costs is about 2,700. He sold most of it for $11 in January 2013 to pay off the loan.

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

In April 2013, Wang co-founded f2pool with Mao Shihang, known online as Discus Fish. They established in Wenzhou. Wang coded the backend. Discus Fish was in charge of the operation. The pool was launched on May 5th and has grown rapidly, accounting for about a third of Bitcoin’s hashrate at its peak.

To date, f2pool has mined over 1.3 million $BTCmore than 9 percent of all blocks ever created. It is one of the largest and longest-running mining pools in Bitcoin history. During the 2017 block size wars, this pool played a quiet but decisive role in supporting Bitcoin’s Nakamoto consensus. Wang later said, “Proof of work is Bitcoin’s constitution. Respect mining, respect miners. Without miner support, SegWit would not have been activated and the Lightning Network would not have been possible.”

From 2014 to the early 2020s, Wang continued to operate f2pool while navigating changes in the industry, including moving operations overseas due to China’s mining crackdown in 2021. In 2017, he discussed the upcoming proof-of-stake era with Vitalik Buterin. This conversation led him to launch stake.fish in 2018. It is a non-custodial staking service that has become one of the largest validators across Ethereum, Polkadot, Solana, and other networks. This move diversifies his infrastructure business across the broader cryptocurrency industry and brings his experience as a large-scale operator to the rapidly changing crypto market.

to the moon

Chun Wang (far right) inside the Crew Dragon capsule with the Fram2 crew strapped down for launch. (Credit: From SpaceX) space dot com)

The next frontier was space. Wang had been pitching a private polar orbit mission to SpaceX starting in 2023. He financed the entire Fram2 flight himself by selling Bitcoin. There are no sponsors or government support. The team trained for eight months in a simulator in California, preparing for high-G spins, zero gravity flight, emergency training and polar survival.

The launch took place on April 1, 2025 from Kennedy Space Center. Mr. Wang commanded from the commander’s chair. “The journey to orbit was much smoother than I expected. I didn’t feel much G-force except for the final moments before SECO. Honestly, it felt like I was on another flight,” he posted. The only time he noticed zero grams was when he accidentally loosened a small stuffed polar bear and it started floating. The entire crew experienced space sickness on the first day. “It didn’t feel like motion sickness in a car or at the beach. Reading on my iPad didn’t make it worse, but even a small sip of water could cause an upset stomach.”

By the second day, the nausea had subsided. “I feel completely refreshed. All traces of motion sickness are gone.” They opened a cupola over Antarctica. “Hello, Antarctica. From 460 kilometers up, it’s pitch white and you can’t see any human activity.” The crew conducted 22 experiments in three and a half days. It’s the first human X-ray in space, including hand scanning with a ring, a reflection of Roentgen’s original 1895 X-rays, growing oyster mushrooms for the Mars food code Mission MushVroom, tracking female hormones with urine strips, radiation monitoring, blood flow restriction, mobile MRI, sleep tracking, and more. Radiation data showed that the South Atlantic anomaly, rather than the poles, produced the highest radiation doses. In fact, polar orbits reduce time in the zone compared to the ISS path, and this was highlighted by the trip’s highlight discovery.

View of Antarctica from the Fram2 cupola. (Credit: Fram2 crew via Space.com)

The splashdown occurred off the coast of California on April 4th. Wang shared radiation graphs in March 2026, confirming that polar radiation exposure was lower than expected. A full scientific paper about the experiment has not yet been published.

Since then, Wang has rarely sat still, receiving his astronaut wings from SpaceX and heading back on the road with NASA’s Johnson inspection behind him. In March 2026, he arrived at Bouvet Island, the 150th territory out of 249 on his travel list, via ship and helicopter, spending 201 hours on the ice before heading to Cape Town. He records his flights and keeps his X account updated with photos, charts, and occasional thoughts on Bitcoin and crypto technology.

March 2026, helicopter departure from Bouvet Island — Trung Wan’s 150th territory. (Credit: Chun Wang, X/@Satofishi)

This article, “The Amazing Life of Chun Wang: From OG Bitcoin Miner to Astronaut” was first published in Bitcoin Magazine and written by Juan Galt.