Written by: Yanz, Liam

On the evening of March 31, 2025, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket rose from the ground in the dazzling flames at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base, Florida.

The rocket equipped with the Dragon spacecraft "Resilience" broke through the sound barrier, broke through the atmosphere, and sailed towards an orbit that humans had never stepped on - the Earth's polar orbit.

"Fram" means "forward" in Norwegian, and is also the name of a groundbreaking polar expedition ship in the late 19th century. In 1893, this ship, known as the "Fram", led scientists to open a new chapter in human exploration of the polar regions.

In the past 60 years, human space industry has made great progress: leaving footprints on the moon, sending probes to the edge of the solar system, and even building space stations. However, no manned spacecraft flew over the Earth's North and South Pole until the arrival of Fram2.

Fram2 created a milestone in the history of space, and for the first time humans have observed the earth in all directions from a polar perspective.

What is even more surprising is that Fram2 is not a space exploration mission, but a Chinese entrepreneur's $200 million exploration journey.

This low-key and mysterious entrepreneur is named Wang Chun. As an important figure in the global Bitcoin mining industry, his feat has made him the second private space mission initiator in history after billionaire Jared Issacman (current director of NASA).

Before the mission began, his friend Bao Erye posted on X that Wang Chun did not make any backup of the Bitcoin private key, and once said that if he was in danger during the mission, his Bitcoin was equivalent to permanent destruction.

What kind of person is Wang Chun?

What kind of belief is that makes a person willing to put his lifeAlso bet on the scale of exploration, pouring $200 million just to find that unknown answer in space?

On May 28, 2011, the unit price was 8.7 US dollars (equivalent), Wang Chun bought the first Bitcoin in his life.

The starting point of the story originated from April. The push of two news reports from the technology website solidot gave Wang Chun the first contact with Bitcoin.

Wang Chun at that time knew nothing about economy and finance, but this technical geek spent a sleepless night on the wiki page of en.bitcoin.it with his strong curiosity.

That night, he studied all night on the website, as if he had discovered a new world.

The following story was filled with geeky experimental spirit and bold adventurer attempts, and he tried to mine with his MacBook notebook of the time, but he got nothing.

On May 28, 2011, he ran to Zhongguancun, bought two graphics cards, assembled a "bitcoin mining machine", and posted several photos to show off his equipment at http://forum.bitcoin.org (now bitcointalk).

After just two days, he "feels that the speed is still too slow and he is still too little", so he chose to cooperate with another early Bitcoin player, Wu Gang, the founder of Coin Information.

On June 1, 2011, the two embarked on a bolder adventure: they spent a month preparing dozens of mining machines, renting four private houses, and forming a small mine.

The equipment is incredibly simple - the dusty second-hand motherboard, 512MB memory stick, Ubuntu system installed on a 4GB USB drive, and even the meter have been "renovated". Even if it is simple, the "angel funds" of this adventure still come from Wang Chun's father, a small business owner in Tianjin, a "borrow" of $40,000.

However, it is these simple and unpretentious opportunitiesThe instrument opened the door to the world of Bitcoin mining for him.

In the first two years, this simple mine brought Wang Chun 7,700 bitcoins to him.

However, when asked about where these Bitcoins were going, Wang Chun always mocked himself: "4,000 people paid the electricity bill, 660 people bought an iPhone, but it was stolen at the St. Petersburg subway station." What made him even more amused was that the remaining Bitcoin was cleared for $17 in early 2013.

In 2013, Pumpkin Zhang (Zhang Nangeng) released the first mining equipment based on ASIC chips, and the computing power of the entire network increased significantly, and the GPU mining era came to an end.

At the turning point of Bitcoin mining, Wang Chun's career also ushered in a turning point.

In April 2013, he and "Colorful Angelfish" (Shenyu) jointly founded F2Pool (Fish Pool), the first Bitcoin mining pool, which 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 Colorful Angelfish, and "2" is the first place in Wang Chun's QQ nickname "2523".

Unlike the mine, the mining pool is similar to a virtual "mining cooperative". Many Bitcoin mining machines join forces to concentrate their computing power to "mine" and distribute their income 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 said proudly: "What I want to do is a company like Facebook and Google."

When dealing with work, it can be said that Wang Chun has reached the level of addiction. He is very diligent and works day and night.

KOL Superjun, a well-known crypto industry, recalled that he had stayed at Wang Chun's home in Phuket. He woke up in the middle of the night and went downstairs to see him discussing the architecture of Stake.fish with Dutch employees. Most of his energy was spent writing code and studying his favorite math and physics, as well as global check-in.

At work, Wang Chun has strict requirements for himself and his employees and cares very much about details.

"His biggest resentment towards me was that he didn't use full cuts of punctuation in emails, so he wrote the P of F2Pool in lowercase, and stepped on his scale," recalled Wang Chun's former colleague and former CMO Zhang Li, F2Pool.

Little Mao Ge, who once worked at Stake.fish, said that Wang Chun requires everyone to speak English at work and cannot make any mistakes in expression. Wang Chun relies on self-taught and speaks English fluently.

Wang Chun likes to recruit different people, or geniuses. He often gives some "IQ test questions" related to numbers during interviews, but he also admitted that "geniuses are a bit difficult, that is, geniuses cannot be managed."

Wang Chun at work is interesting. He loves to deal with different Bitcoiners around the world, but he is separated from work, but in everyone's opinion, he doesn't get along with his friends very much. "It's not a question of who is a friend. There are too many businessmen in this circle. It's hard to be friends."

When Wang Chun likes to read. There was a time when he read the book "Parallel Universe".

How big is the universe? What's there? Perhaps it has always been the question he wanted to answer during his adventures.

"He took the train and high-speed train a long time ago, and then flew the planes from all over the world again. It was natural to enter space."

Zhang Li was not surprised at all about Wang Chun's space exploration.

In Zhang Li's memory, "Wang Chun is often in Beijing in the morning, and he may not know which one he flew to at night, but he actually found him in the office the next day."

GoIn Afghanistan, I left the airport and stayed at a nearby hotel for one night, and flew away early the next morning. This is a typical Wang Chun style trip, a simple destination check-in enthusiast.

Wang Chun actually prefers to take trains than take off.

In 2007, Wang Chun traveled 75,900 kilometers on the railway only on weekends, which means he spent two months on the train throughout the year, and the other 10 months were left for sleeping and office.

He once showed Zhang Li the ticket stubs left by train in 2008, which echoed his former Weibo nickname - "High-speed Railway Thousand Times Man".

Picture: Lishu

In 2013, Wang Chun used the high-speed rail/train to check in all provinces, then transferred the check-in mission to the sky, and recorded every flight on social media.

"This is the 110th air trip in 2019. Air China CA4029 flight from Chengdu to Daxing, Beijing. This flight is the first flight of Air China CTU-PKX route, so it did not detour Ordos." On October 27, 2019, Wang Chun wrote in his circle of friends.

In 2021, even though the epidemic was raging, he went to 27 this year and set foot on the Antarctic continent, crossing the snow-covered wasteland, and going to the southernmost end of the earth to experience the harshness and loneliness of the polar regions.

Two years later, in 2023, he set foot on the frozen land of the North Pole and explored the wonders of the endless ice fields and the extreme day and night.

His life goal is to travel all and regions in the ISO3166 code, 249.

"My own journey was shaped by lifelong curiosity and obsession with breaking boundaries," Wang Chun once explained his love for travel in an interview.

At present, Wang Chun has completed 54% of the target journey (135 of 249and extend his punch-in map to space orbit.

"Hello, Antarctica.

Separate from the previous expectation, from a height of 460 kilometers, it is pure white and there is no human activity."

April 2 at 16:14, Wang Chun posted his new check-in in the sky above the polar region.

This time, he used a new perspective to re-examine the land he had measured with his feet. Count, take off

"Counter", this is the title given to Wang Chun by his friend Super Jun.

This title can be interpreted as his use of blocks to measure time and computing power to maintain blockchain order. A more direct explanation is that he has an almost paranoid love for numbers. Since childhood, he has been keen on memorizing pi, root number two, root number three, and even keeping the private key in mind.

When interviewing employees, he even asks the interviewer what is a certain number of pi?

The most praised thing is his QQ signature count that lasted 2523 days. Since junior high school, he changed his signature to incremental numbers every day, from 1 to 2523, and stopped until he felt bored, and finally the 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 "Colorful Angelfish" - "2" comes from the first character of his QQ nickname "2".

In the cryptocurrency industry, people usually like to give Bitcoin OG a nickname, "Wanbihou".

No one knows how much BTC was in Wang Chun's peak period, but what is certain is that there are definitely more than 10,000. Wang Chun also told his friends without any concealment how much Bitcoin he "wasted".

For example, in 2016, Wang Chun once sold 5,000 bitcoins and purchased a luxury house located on the 67th floor of Pixel Building in Bangkok. At that time, the price of Bitcoin was 6,000 yuan, and now the unit price of Bitcoin is 600,000 yuan.

In addition to the big bitcoin player, Wang Chun is also a supporter of Dogecoin. He once operated http://dogecoin.org and produced a Dogecoin movie "Dogecoin Billionaire". Later, Wang Chun gave the domain name to the Dogecoin Foundation for free.

On November 11, 2024, Wang Chun proudly stated that since the launch of F2Pool in 2013, we have mined $16.2 billion, accounting for 11% of the total existing Dogecoin.

(Note: 16.2 billion DOGE is the result of collective mining of the entire mining pool and its miners, not Wang Chun’s personal mining volume. The mining pool plays the role of organizing and allocating computing resources in this process, providing stable mining services to miners around the world.)

The next day (November 12), Wang Chun set up a Flag, "If the DOGE price exceeds $1, I will buy a Mars mission and fly over Phoenix. The mission name is Marsrise, and the launch time is January 19, 2029, the last day of Trump's term."

Also loves aerospace, Wang Chun's life seems destined to intersect with another Dogecoin supporter - Musk, who is also a Tesla owner.

Now, Wang Chun has already boarded Musk's SpaceX's Dragon Spaceship, "traveling" in the polar orbit of the earth, accompanying the stars.

He carried a piece of deck wood from the 19th-century polar expedition ship "Fram" during his mission, paying tribute to the spirit of polar expedition.

On the official website of Farm2, the "Star Wars"-style opening subtitles are scrolling:

March 31, 2025 21:46 ET:50, SpaceX will launch Fram2. You will see that humans are no longer flying in space as they used to be. Following the glory of the early heroic polar pioneers, a four-person space expedition from six will be the first humans to fly across the North and South Poles and witness the Earth's polar wilderness from space. They will fly around the Earth for 3 to 5 days...

The crew plans to complete 22 scientific experiments in the mission, including shooting aurora and studying the impact of weightless environments on the human body. These experiments 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 that our mission can inspire more people to pursue their curiosity." Zweig wrote in his book "When the Stars of Humanity Shine": "The greatest luck in a person's life is to discover his mission in the middle of his life, that is, when he was young and strong." Wang Chun was lucky, simple and pure.

A former Bitcoin mining person said that although he does not agree with Wang Chun's ideological views, he admires that he has always adhered to his mission and love and has not been alienated by the currency circle.

In his opinion, the currency circle is a big dyeing vat, and most of the early participants were grassroots. Many people released their human desires after getting rich overnight and were immersed in the noise of the bright lights and wine. Only Wang Chun took the initiative to embrace loneliness.

His ex-girlfriend commented on Wang Chun, unlike people in the currency circle. "In his world, except for the code, there are only stars and seas. I envy him for maintaining his unique "childishness" in the chaotic currency circle. Making less friends may be his best solution." In March, Wang Chun posted a tweet with a picture of him next to the moai statue on Easter Island in Chile. Next to it is the corresponding Ghibli-style AI photo, with the caption that artificial intelligence is making our world a better place.

This may be Wang Chun's yearningLife, at the intersection of technology and poetry, find your own tranquility and freedom.

Wang Chun's story begins with numbers and order. He counts in time, counts in space, and then completes the countdown before the Falcon 9 rocket launches, looking for real stars in polar orbit.

At this moment, he was staring at the farther sea of ​​stars. This trip, which is expected to last for 3 days and 14 hours, is an unfinished adventure and an unfinished dream of mankind.

Besides the stars, there are still more unknowns waiting, and Wang Chun is still on the road.