Key Takeaways:
Chun Wang, the co-founder of the F2Pool bitcoin mining pool, will lead the first private crewed mission to Mars aboard a SpaceX Starship, the company announced. The two-year interplanetary journey represents a new frontier for private space exploration, funded by wealth generated in the early days of cryptocurrency mining.
"A lot of people [are] talking about the whole Mars to be like we're going to fly to Mars, we're going to land on Mars, we're going to build [a] city on Mars,” Wang said in a pre-recorded video. “But let's get it started with a flyby."
The announcement, made during the webcast for the since-scrubbed Starship V3 launch, connects one of crypto's largest mining operations directly to the aerospace giant's ambitious expansion. F2Pool holds about 11.3% of the global Bitcoin hashrate, according to Hashrate Index. The mission reveal comes as SpaceX confidentially files for a public offering that could value the company at $1.75 trillion and has disclosed corporate treasury holdings of 8,285 BTC.
This mission marks a significant use of cryptocurrency-derived wealth to fund large-scale technological and exploration endeavors, lending a new dimension to the "institutional adoption" narrative. Before embarking on the Mars flyby, Wang will first participate in a week-long commercial mission around the Moon, a flight designed to test Starship's systems for long-duration spaceflight.
This is not Wang's first venture into space. In 2025, he funded and commanded the Fram2 mission, a three-day flight in a SpaceX Crew Dragon that was the first to fly over both of Earth's poles. That mission, like the upcoming Mars journey, was financed by Wang's personal bitcoin holdings. He has described himself as a "full time traveler" after building his fortune through F2Pool, which he co-founded in 2013.
The Mars mission is a far more ambitious undertaking. The round-trip journey will take approximately two years and will rely on the success of SpaceX's Starship V3, the most powerful rocket ever built. The vehicle is still in its testing phase, with its first orbital flight yet to be achieved, making the timeline for Wang's interplanetary trip an open question.
The mission is a component of Elon Musk’s long-stated goal of establishing a human colony on Mars. The use of private funding from crypto entrepreneurs like Wang provides an alternative pathway to financing these capital-intensive projects. The flight is intended to gather critical data on hardware performance and the biomedical effects of long-duration space travel, which is essential for planning future, permanent settlements on the Red Planet.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
