SpaceX names Bitcoin heavyweight Chun Wang for Mars-bound Starship mission; IPO filing shows $1.45B BTC stake
SpaceX is turning to a prominent crypto figure for its first human venture beyond Earth: blockchain entrepreneur and former Bitcoin-mining powerbroker Chun Wang will join a Starship mission aimed at the Mars system.
Wang, a China-born investor and Maltese citizen, has already flown with SpaceX. He commanded Fram2, a privately funded mission he proposed in 2023 that became the first crewed flight to traverse Earth's polar regions, with SpaceX operating the mission.
SpaceX said Wang is now set for a much longer journey. The plan calls for a roughly two-year mission that will leave the Earth–Moon system, conduct a Mars flyby, and return to Earth.
Before his space plans, Wang co-founded F2Pool, one of the world's largest Bitcoin mining pools, which aggregates miners' computing power to improve the odds of earning block rewards. At its peak, F2Pool ranked first globally and remains a major player. MiningPoolStats data shows F2Pool currently runs about 111.35 exahashes per second (EH/s), around 10.2% of Bitcoin's total network hashrate, trailing Foundry (303.84 EH/s) and AntPool (183 EH/s).
Wang has also expanded into proof-of-stake infrastructure. He founded Stakefish, a non-custodial validator service that enables staking across multiple PoS networks, including Ethereum.
Ahead of the Mars-focused mission, Wang will participate in SpaceX's first planned commercial crewed flight around the Moon. The week-long circumlunar trip is expected to pass within about 200 km of the lunar surface and is intended to help validate Starship systems for deep-space, long-duration operations. Dennis and Akiko Tito are also slated to fly.
In a separate disclosure, SpaceX's recent S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for its planned June 12 IPO reported the company held 18,712 Bitcoin as of March 31, valued at roughly $1.45 billion at the time of filing. SpaceX listed a cost basis of $35,320 per BTC, indicating sizable unrealized gains with Bitcoin trading near $77,300. The holding exceeded some estimates tracked by public treasury monitors.
The selection of a crypto-native space traveler alongside the size of SpaceX's Bitcoin position highlights the growing overlap between blockchain and space — linking terrestrial hashpower to human missions beyond Earth.
