Prominent digital asset pioneer Chun Wang, the Chinese-born Maltese entrepreneur who co-founded the massive Bitcoin mining protocol F2Pool, has officially funded and joined SpaceX’s inaugural crewed interplanetary mission to Mars. The historic private aviation contract, announced by SpaceX, outlines a grueling two-year-long deep space itinerary engineered to push manned spacecraft well beyond lunar boundaries, execute a precise atmospheric flyby of the Red Planet, and return the crew safely back to Earth.
Prior to embarking on the multi-year Martian journey, Wang has also secured an individual ticket for a separate, weeklong commercial spaceflight traversing the orbital circumference of the moon.
The strategic financing comes as a growing cohort of ultra-high-net-worth technology executives, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Virgin’s Richard Branson, and Shift4 Payments’ Jared Isaacman, increasingly use private capital to bankroll the bleeding edge of aerospace development. While SpaceX tentatively schedules automated Starship heavy-cargo supply drops to Mars for research, logistics, and resource caching to begin no earlier than 2028, Wang expressed deep concern that public state-level space agencies might deprioritize interplanetary travel in favor of competing for localized lunar outposts. By aggressively fronting the capital for a dedicated crewed flyby, Wang hopes to lock in an inflexible corporate timeline that forces humanity to confront deep space exploration within the current generation.
Wang is uniquely positioned to finance such massive capital-intensive operations due to his early structural success in the cryptocurrency sector. He co-founded F2Pool back in 2013, establishing one of the earliest localized Bitcoin mining networks, which has since grown to control a commanding 11.85% share of the aggregate global hash rate. This Mars venture marks Wang’s second major collaboration with SpaceX; he previously financed and commanded the specialized “Fram2” polar orbit mission, a high-altitude expedition that successfully analyzed unusual atmospheric light emissions over Earth’s poles while conducting pioneering space-medicine and biological research.
