SpaceX has tapped a familiar face from the crypto world for its first crewed interplanetary mission: Chun Wang, a blockchain entrepreneur and former Bitcoin mining magnate, will fly aboard Starship on the company’s inaugural human mission to Mars.
Wang — a Chinese-born, Malta-citizen investor — is no stranger to spaceflight. He commanded Fram2, the privately funded mission he proposed in 2023 that became the first human flight to traverse Earth’s polar regions, with SpaceX serving as operator. Now he’s signed on for a far longer voyage: a planned two-year mission that will travel beyond the Earth–Moon system, perform a flyby of Mars, and return to Earth, SpaceX said.
Before his space ambitions, Wang co-founded F2Pool, one of the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pools. Mining pools combine miners’ computing power to improve the odds of winning block rewards; at its peak F2Pool was the biggest in the world and it remains a top contender today. According to MiningPoolStats, F2Pool currently operates about 111.35 exahashes per second (EH/s), roughly 10.2% of Bitcoin’s total network hashrate, placing it behind Foundry (303.84 EH/s) and AntPool (183 EH/s).
Wang has also branched into proof-of-stake infrastructure. He founded Stakefish, a non-custodial validator service that lets investors stake assets across multiple PoS networks, including Ethereum.
Before Wang heads to Mars, he’ll take part in SpaceX’s first planned commercial human flight around the Moon — a week-long circumlunar mission that will fly within about 200 km of the lunar surface. The company intends this flight to validate Starship systems for deep-space, long-duration operations; Wang will join passengers Dennis and Akiko Tito on that trip.
Separately, SpaceX’s recent S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of its planned June 12 IPO revealed a notable crypto disclosure: the company held 18,712 Bitcoin as of March 31, worth roughly $1.45 billion at the time of the filing. SpaceX reported a cost basis of $35,320 per BTC, implying a significant unrealized gain given Bitcoin’s current trading level near $77,300. That disclosed stash was larger than some public treasury trackers had estimated.
The appointment of a crypto-native space traveler and the reveal of SpaceX’s substantial Bitcoin holdings underline growing intersections between the blockchain and space sectors — from mined hashes on Earth to human missions beyond it.
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