SpaceX has announced its first crew member for an interplanetary mission to Mars, and it happens to be someone with roots to Bitcoin mining.
F2Pool Co-Founder Joins First SpaceX Human Flight Mission To Mars
According to a SpaceX website announcement, Chun Wang is set to fly aboard Starship’s first human spaceflight interplanetary mission to Mars. Wang was previously the commander of Fram2, the first mission that saw humans fly over the Earth’s poles.
Before his SpaceX fame, Wang was known for being the co-founder of F2Pool, a major Bitcoin mining pool. A “mining pool” refers to a collective of miners who pool together their computing power to have better odds at striking the block reward.
At one point, F2Pool was the largest such pool in the entire world. Today, it’s still quite dominant in the space, ranking third on MiningPoolStats‘ list.
The list of the largest BTC mining pools in the world today | Source: MiningPoolStats
From the table, it’s visible that F2Pool hosts a Bitcoin Hashrate or total computing power of 111.35 exahashes per second (EH/s) right now, equivalent to 10.2% of the network’s total Hahrate. Only Foundry and AntPool are ahead of F2Pool with computing powers of 303.84 EH/s and 183 EH/s, respectively.
While F2Pool is for proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains (that is, networks that involve the process of mining for reaching consensus), the Chinese-born investor also eventually founded something for the proof-of-stake (PoS) networks: Stakefish, a non-custodial validator that allows investors to stake across a number of blockchains, including Ethereum.
Back in 2023, Wang proposed the idea of a polar spaceflight to SpaceX, which culminated into Fram2. The mission was privately funded by him, with SpaceX acting as the operator.
Now, it seems the Maltese-citizenship holder has set his eyes on Mars. “The two-year mission will explore outside the Earth-Moon system before flying-by the Red Planet and returning to Earth,” noted the announcement.
Mars is still far, though; Wang initially has to embark on the first planned SpaceX commercial human spaceflight around the Moon. For this mission, he will be joining the company of Dennis and Akiko Tito. SpaceX explained:
The week-long circumlunar fly-by mission will help advance Starship’s systems for deep-space, long-duration missions and is planned to fly within 200 km of the Moon’s surface.
Speaking of SpaceX, the company filed its S-1 registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this Wednesday ahead of its planned stock market debut on June 12th.
The filing revealed something interesting: the Elon Musk-founded firm held 18,712 Bitcoin as of March 31st. This stack, worth roughly $1.45 billion, is significantly larger than some treasury holdings tracker websites estimated for SpaceX.
The company is also holding a notable gain on these holdings as its cost basis per Bitcoin stands at just $35,320.
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