Original author: Yanz, Liam
On the evening of March 31, 2025, at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida, SpaceXs Falcon 9 rocket took off amidst a brilliant glow of fire.
The rocket carrying the Dragon spacecraft Resilience broke the sound barrier, broke through the atmosphere, and headed for an orbit that no human has ever set foot on - Earths polar orbit.
Fram means forward in Norwegian, and it was also the name of a groundbreaking polar exploration ship in the late 19th century. In 1893, the ship called Fram led scientists to open a new chapter in human exploration of the polar regions.
Over the past 60 years, human spaceflight has made great progress: leaving footprints on the moon, sending probes to the edge of the solar system, and even building a space station. However, no manned spacecraft has ever flown over the Earths North and South Poles until the arrival of Fra m2.
Fra m2 created a milestone in the history of space exploration, as it was the first time that humans observed the Earth from a full polar perspective.
What is even more surprising is that Fra m2 is not a space exploration mission of a certain countrys government, but an exploration journey invested by a Chinese entrepreneur at a cost of US$200 million.
This low-key and mysterious entrepreneur is named Wang Chun. As an important figure in the global Bitcoin mining industry, his feat makes him the second private space mission in history after billionaire Jared Issacman (current NASA director).
Before the mission began, his good friend Bao Erye posted on X that Wang Chun did not make any backup of his Bitcoin private key, and said that if he encountered danger during the mission, his Bitcoin would be permanently destroyed.
What kind of person is Wang Chun?
What kind of belief makes a person willing to bet his life on the scale of exploration and invest $200 million just to find the unknown answer in space?
The legend started by two graphics cards
On May 28, 2011, Wang Chun bought his first Bitcoin at a price of US$8.7 per Bitcoin.
The story began in April, when two news reports from the technology website solidot introduced Wang Chun to Bitcoin for the first time.
At that time, Wang Chun knew nothing about economics and finance, but this technology geek spent a sleepless night on the wiki page of en.bitcoin.it due to his strong curiosity.
That night, he studied all the content on the website all night long, as if he had discovered a new world.
The following story is full of geek-like experimental spirit and adventurous attempts. He tried to mine with the MacBook laptop at the time, but got nothing.
On May 28, 2011, he went to Zhongguancun, bought two graphics cards, assembled a bitcoin mining machine, and posted a few photos on http://forum.bitcoin.org (now bitcointalk) to show off his equipment.
After just two days, he felt that the speed was still too slow and the amount mined was still too little, so he chose to cooperate with another early Bitcoin player, Wu Gang, who later became the founder of BiXin.
On June 1, 2011, the two embarked on an even bolder adventure: they spent a month purchasing dozens of mining machines, rented four houses, and set up a small mine.
The equipment was incredibly rudimentary—a dusty second-hand motherboard, a 512MB memory stick, a 4GB USB drive with the Ubuntu system installed, and even the electric meter had been modified. Even though it was rudimentary, the angel funding for this adventure came from a $40,000 loan from Wang Chuns father, a small business owner in Tianjin.
However, it was these unpretentious machines that opened the door to the world of Bitcoin mining for him.
In the first two years, this simple mine brought Wang Chun a profit of 7,700 bitcoins.
However, when asked about the whereabouts of these bitcoins, Wang Chun always said with some self-mockery: 4,000 of them were used to pay electricity bills, 660 of them were used to buy an iPhone, and they were stolen at the St. Petersburg subway station.
What made him laugh and cry was that he sold the remaining bitcoins at a price of $17 in early 2013.
In 2013, Pumpkin Zhang (Zhang Nangeng) released the first mining equipment based on ASIC chips. The computing power of the entire network increased significantly, and the era of GPU mining farms came to an end.
The turning point of Bitcoin mining also marked a turning point for Wang Chun’s career.
In April 2013, he co-founded F2Pool with Seven-Colored Angelfish (Shenyu), which was Chinas first Bitcoin mining pool and later developed into one of the largest comprehensive mining pools in the world.
The origin of this name carries some Wang Chun-style humor - Fish is taken from the ID of the discus fish, and 2 is the first digit of Wang Chuns QQ nickname 2523.
Unlike a mining farm, a mining pool is like a virtual mining cooperative. Many Bitcoin mining machines work together to concentrate computing power to mine and distribute profits according to the contribution ratio of each participant.
Around 2018, Wang Chun founded his second company, Stake.fish, in Thailand, focusing on staking services for blockchain assets under the POS mechanism.
In order to achieve globalization, he formed an international team spanning 16 nationalities and distributed in 11 regions. He proudly said: I want to build a company like Facebook and Google.
When it comes to work, it can be said that Wang Chun has reached the point of obsession. He is very diligent and works day and night.
Chaoyuejun, a well-known KOL in the crypto industry, recalled that he once stayed at Wang Chun’s home in Phuket. He woke up in the middle of the night and went downstairs to see him still discussing the architecture of Stake.fish with Dutch employees. Most of his energy was spent on writing code, studying his favorite mathematics and physics, and checking in around the world.
At work, Wang Chun has strict requirements for himself and his employees and pays great attention to details.
His biggest complaints against me were that he didnt use all punctuation marks in his emails, wrote the P in F2Pool as a lowercase letter, and stepped on his scale, recalled Zhang Li, a former colleague of Wang Chun and former CMO of F2Pool.
Xiao Mao, who used to work at Stake.fish, said that Wang Chun required everyone to speak English at work and there must not be any errors in expression. Wang Chun spoke fluent English through self-study.
Wang Chun likes to recruit different people, or geniuses, and often gives some IQ test questions related to numbers during interviews. But he also admits that there is one particularly difficult thing about geniuses, which is that they are impossible to manage.
Wang Chun is interesting at work. He loves to travel around the world and interact with different Bitcoiners. But when he is not working, he doesn’t get along with friends. “It’s hard to say who are my friends. There are too many businessmen in this circle. It’s hard to make friends.”
When he is not working, Wang Chun likes to read. For a while, the book he read was Parallel Universe.
How big is the universe? What is in it? Perhaps these are the questions he wants to answer during his adventurous journey.
The man who took a thousand high-speed trains is always on the road
He had ridden the trains and high-speed trains a long time ago, and then flown all over the world. Going to space was a natural thing for him.
Zhang Li was not at all surprised that Wang Chun was going on a space expedition.
Zhang Li recalled that Wang Chun was often in Beijing in the morning and flew to another country in the evening, but he was still in the office the next day.
Going to Afghanistan, leaving the airport to stay in a nearby hotel for one night, and flying away early the next morning. This is a typical Wang Chun-style trip, a pure destination check-in enthusiast.
Wang Chun actually prefers taking the train to taking the plane.
In 2007, Wang Chun traveled 75,900 kilometers on the railway, traveling only on weekends, which means that he spent two months of the year on the train and the other 10 months were left for sleeping and working in the office.
He once showed Zhang Li a ticket stub from a train ride in 2008, which echoed his former Weibo nickname - High-speed Rail Thousand Times Man.
Image: Li Shuo
In 2013, Wang Chun used high-speed rail/trains to clock in all provinces in China, and then transferred the clocking task to the sky and recorded every flight on social media.
This is the 110th air trip in 2019, Air China flight CA 4029 from Chengdu Shuangliu to Beijing Daxing. This flight is the first flight of Air Chinas CTU-PKX route, so it does not detour around Ordos. Wang Chun wrote in his circle of friends on October 27, 2019.
In 2021, even though the epidemic was raging, he visited 27 countries that year, set foot on the Antarctic continent, crossed the ice-covered wilderness, and went to the southernmost tip of the earth to experience the harshness and loneliness of the polar regions.
Two years later, in 2023, he set foot on the icy land of the Arctic again to explore the wonders of the boundless ice fields and the polar day and night.
His life goal is to travel to all 249 countries and regions in the ISO 3166 code.
My own journey has been shaped by a lifelong curiosity and a fascination with pushing boundaries, Wang Chun once explained in an interview about her love for traveling.
Currently, Wang Chun has completed 54% of his target journey (135 out of 249) and extended his check-in map to space orbit.
Hello, Antarctica.
Contrary to what I had expected, the view from 460 kilometers above the ground was pure white, with no human activity visible.”
At 16:14 on April 2, Wang Chun posted his new check-in above the polar region.
This time, he re-examined the land that he had once measured with his feet from a completely new perspective.
Counting, Liftoff
Counter is the title given to Wang Chun by his good friend Chaochaojun.
This title can be interpreted as he uses blocks to measure time and uses computing power to maintain the order of the blockchain. A more direct explanation is that he has an almost paranoid love for numbers.
Since childhood, he has been keen on reciting pi, square root of two, square root of three, and even memorized the private key.
When interviewing employees, he would even ask the interviewer what a certain digit of pi is.
The most famous thing about him is his QQ signature counting which lasted for 2523 days. Since middle school, he changed his signature to an increasing number every day, from 1 to 2523, until he felt bored and stopped counting. Finally, his QQ signature stopped at 2523.
This seemingly random number later became the origin of the name of the F2Pool mining pool he co-founded with Seven-Colored Angelfish - 2 comes from the first character 2 of his QQ nickname.
In the cryptocurrency industry, people usually like to give Bitcoin OG a nickname, Hou of Ten Thousand Coins.
No one knows how many BTC Wang Chun had at his peak, but it is certain that it was more than 10,000. Wang Chun also told his friends how many bitcoins he had wasted.
For example, in 2016, Wang Chun sold 5,000 bitcoins to buy a luxury house on the 67th floor of Bangkoks landmark Pixel Building. At that time, the price of bitcoin was 6,000 yuan, and now the price of a bitcoin is 600,000 yuan.
In addition to being a major Bitcoin holder, Wang Chun is also a supporter of Dogecoin. He once operated http://dogecoin.org and produced a Dogecoin movie Dogecoin Billionaire. Later, Wang Chun donated the domain name to the Dogecoin Foundation free of charge.
On November 11, 2024, Wang Chun proudly stated that since the launch of F2Pool in 2013, we have mined 16.2 billion $DOGE, accounting for 11% of the total existing Dogecoin.
(Note: 16.2 billion DOGE is the collective mining result of the entire mining pool and its miners, not the mining volume of Wang Chun personally. The mining pool plays the role of organizing and allocating computing resources in this process, providing stable mining services for miners around the world.)
The next day (November 12), Wang Chun set a flag, If the price of DOGE breaks through $1, I will buy a Mars mission and fly over Phobos. The mission name is Marsrise, and the launch time is January 19, 2029, the last day of Trumps term.
As a person who also loves aerospace, Wang Chuns life seems destined to intersect with another Dogecoin supporter - Musk. Wang Chun is also a Tesla owner.
Today, Wang Chun is already on board Musks SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, traveling in the Earths polar orbit, accompanying the stars.
He carried a piece of deck wood from the 19th century polar exploration ship Fram on his mission, paying tribute to the spirit of polar exploration.
On the Farm2 official website, a Star Wars-style opening subtitle scrolls:
On March 31, 2025 at 21:46:50 EST, SpaceX will launch Fram2. You will see that human spaceflight will never be the same again.
Following in the footsteps of early pioneers, a team of four space explorers from six countries will become the first humans to fly over the Earths North and South Poles and see the Earths polar wilderness from space. They will orbit the Earth for 3 to 5 days...
The crew plans to complete 22 scientific experiments during the mission, including photographing the aurora and studying the impact of a weightless environment on the human body. These experiments will not only provide data for scientific research, but also accumulate experience for future space exploration.
In an interview with CBS, Wang Chun said: This mission is not about going to space, but about pushing boundaries and sharing knowledge... We hope our mission can inspire more people to pursue their curiosity.
In his book When the Stars of Humanity Shine, Zweig wrote: “The greatest luck in a person’s life is to discover his mission in the middle of his life, that is, in the prime of his life.”
Wang Chun is lucky, simple and pure.
A former Bitcoin mining professional said that although he disagreed with some of Wang Chun’s ideological views, he admired him for sticking to his mission and passion and not being alienated by the cryptocurrency world.
In his opinion, the cryptocurrency world is a big melting pot. Most of the early participants are from grassroots backgrounds. After becoming rich overnight, many people release their human desires and indulge in the hustle and bustle of feasting and revelry. Only Wang Chun actively embraced loneliness.
His ex-girlfriend commented that Wang Chun is not like someone in the cryptocurrency circle. In his world, there are only stars and the sea besides the code. I envy him for being able to maintain his unique childishness in the turbulent cryptocurrency circle. Making fewer friends may be the best solution for him.
In March, Wang Chun posted a tweet with a photo of himself next to the Moai statues on Easter Island in Chile, next to a corresponding Ghibli-style AI photo, and the caption: Artificial intelligence is making our world a better place.
This may be the life that Wang Chun longs for, finding his own tranquility and freedom at the intersection of technology and poetry.
Wang Chuns story begins with numbers and order. He counts in time, counts in space, and then completes the countdown before the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket, searching for the real stars in polar orbit.
At this moment, he is gazing at the sea of stars in the distance. This journey, which is expected to last for 3 days and 14 hours, is an unfinished adventure and an unfulfilled dream of mankind.
Beyond the stars, there are still more unknowns waiting, and Wang Chun is still on the road.
