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John-Paul Thorbjornsen, who additionally goes by the identify “JP Thor,” not too long ago confessed to one thing he had been hiding for a really very long time.
He’s the founding father of a widely known layer-1 cross-chain protocol — THORChain — and pretended to be a totally made-up lady known as “Leena” for six years whereas doing it.
Now, just some months after revealing his identification, Thorbjornsen has revealed his subsequent campaign: “vampire-attacking” dangerous gamers within the decentralized finance (DeFi) business whereas constructing his personal tremendous app.
“I’m vampire-attacking all of DeFi to wake everybody up,” Thorbjornsen tells Journal. “I’m launching a six-month assault on all the pieces in DeFi.”
In crypto, a vampire attack happens when one undertaking affords greater incentives or advantages to snatch users or liquidity from one other undertaking, sucking the life out of them. Actually nasty ones might find yourself shuttering a undertaking completely.
“I’m actually paying for folks to maneuver liquidity round to chase incentives and to principally assault different protocols,” says Thorbjornsen.
On X, Thorbjornsen said this may contain a mixture of social, governance and liquidity pool migration “assaults.”
“They’re all tied up; they’re all gradual rugs, and I’m simply sick of the grifting and the profiteering and nobody constructing significant stuff.”
Thorbjornsen mentioned the subsequent part after that may be to construct DECASWAP, a DeFi tremendous app that can bundle all “credible” DeFi protocols right into a single mega interface and aggregator.
PREPARE TO GET VAMPED!!!
Let’s kick of DeFi Summer time 2.0 with Memes, Cash and Momentum.
The very best memes have the shortest circuit between the narrative and the identify. So let’s simply name this factor what it’s.
It is time to channel all that destructive power from rugging founders,… pic.twitter.com/j2SQT0lFCi
— JP.THOR | ACCEL (@jpthor) June 22, 2024
His plan is to finally merge 10–20 different initiatives and appeal to 100 million customers, presumably leaving the others to fend for themselves.
“I’m simply doing an enormous M&A [merger and acquisition]; all the pieces I’m constructing already exists. I’m simply folding it into an enormous model; it’s an enormous coordination train,” he says.
“So, I’m simply placing all of DeFi on discover, and we’ll assault all of them.”
It comes just some months after Thorbjornsen revealed his true identification because the founding father of THORChain, a layer-1 decentralized protocol that permits customers to commerce native belongings between completely different blockchains with out the necessity for wrapped or pegged belongings.
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He’s additionally been fairly busy in between all of this, launching Vultisig, a self-custodial multichain crypto pockets with in-built two-factor authentication, which ended up unintentionally birthing the concept for a memecoin-focused decentralized change WEWESWAP.
JP Thor’s gender reveal
In March, Thorbjornsen revealed he had been constructing the protocol below the pseudonym “Leena” for the higher a part of six years.
“I wished to construct hardcore, within the weeds. I didn’t need to go to conferences. I didn’t need to go to panels, do circle-jerk founder retreats or that nonsense.”
“I constructed up Leena as this type of founder to ship the protocol,” says Thorbjornsen.
THORChain was based in mid-2018 and went dwell in June 2022 after 4 years of improvement. In March, the cross-chain protocol notched over $11 billion in swap quantity, the primary in its historical past, in line with information from ViewBlock.
For some, it was a heartbreaking second. “Leena” was a extremely revered determine within the THORChain group and introduced “herself” as an admin and lead developer, garnering herself just a little fanbase of her personal.
“I actually generated her on ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com,” Thorbjornsen says, referencing the AI face generator launched by a 33-year-old software program engineer at Uber in 2019.
“I wished to show some extent: that anybody might construct a undertaking based mostly solely on the deserves of their output.”
“It ought to be fully irrelevant who you might be, who you appear to be, what your avatar is; it’s best to simply be capable of actually compete in an area of intelligence,” says Thorbjornsen.
Why kill Leena?
For six years Leena might have nuked the THORChain undertaking by giving up, rugging the treasury, firing the devs, abandoning the undertaking.
However that time has handed. There’s actually nothing she will do now to cease the protocol marching ahead. It’s autonomous,…
— JP.THOR | ACCEL (@jpthor) May 18, 2024
For higher or worse, the crypto business tends to idolize its high-profile founders. For instance, attempt speaking about Ethereum with out mentioning its high-profile co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
In June 2017, a hoax about his death from a car crash amplified an ETH flash crash on the time — the place its value fell 22% over a span of three days.
Even convicted felon Sam Bankman-Fried was almost inseparable from the crypto change he based within the public’s eye. The popularity of each burned collectively when the change collapsed in November 2022 as a result of misappropriated buyer funds.
“[Projects] shouldn’t be constructed round folks, and the people who find themselves constructing to attempt to connect themselves to initiatives and reinforce their very own public profile, they need to simply be fluid and give attention to the output of their intelligence.”
Journal requested whether or not he felt he was handled any in a different way as a feminine, and Thorbjornsen mentioned he was, at most, underestimated.
“I used to be at all times handled with respect,” recollects Thorbjornsen. “Individuals at all times addressed me as ‘ma’am’ within the Discord, and there was by no means any sexism or something, which is fairly loopy.”
“I feel, at most instances, Leena was underestimated. However as soon as folks might see the standard of her outputs, then she was assessed accurately for who she was.”
Knowledge from Foreign exchange Recommend in 2023 found that solely three of the 50 most influential crypto CEOs are girls, and Triple-An information shows round 39% of crypto house owners are feminine.
Thorbjornsen dreamed of going to area, however Bitcoin modified all that
Thorbjornsen grew up on a small island off the coast of Australia’s Northern Territory amongst eight brothers and one sister. He tells Journal he dreamed of changing into an astronaut as a child.
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“I used to be studying science books and aviation books. My mother and father had a library to offer to us youngsters […] I wished to discover the universe. I believed that was the subsequent frontier,” says Thorbjornsen.
That considering finally led Thorbjornsen on a navy path. He joined the Royal Australian Air Drive in 2007 and commenced coaching as a fighter pilot in 2012. 4 years later, he had accrued over 2,000 flight hours in coaching and deployments around the globe.
However it was in mid-2013 when Thorbjornsen’s world started to flip — he heard somebody on stage at a startup convention speaking a couple of Bitcoin change and went residence to Google what it was.
“I simply went forward and Googled it and browse the white paper, and that’s after I was impressed. I used to be like: ‘That is going to alter the world, actually.’”
In 2017, Thorbjornsen deserted his profession path within the Air Drive and went all-in on crypto.
That very same 12 months, he raised hundreds of thousands in Ether in what was Australia’s second-largest preliminary coin providing on the time to launch CanYa, a blockchain-based market the place people can provide providers (mowing the garden, doing the dishes) and obtain fee in cryptocurrencies.
{The marketplace} finally failed.
“I moved shortly and raised some cash, but it surely was a misdirection. No person used the merchandise. We constructed the product, however no person ever used it,” he recollects.
“And it was throughout that point interval that I noticed the precise factor to construct, the hardcore factor, was a decentralized change.”
However that’s to not say his piloting days are over.
Get to the chopper
Whereas Thorbjornsen has some lofty crypto ambitions for the subsequent 5 years, you’ll in all probability see him on the information quickly.
In February, he introduced on the Singapore Airshow that he was now planning an expedition with two helicopters to circumnavigate the globe.
Thorbjornsen and one other pilot will take off from Darwin within the first quarter of 2026 and fly from the North Pole to the South Pole, masking 30,000 nautical miles in a 12-month journey.
He’ll be masking 50 nations over seven continents and can cross the equator thrice.
“No person’s ever achieved it earlier than, however we now have all of the means and machines to do this. It simply takes somebody to get within the area to really do it.”
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Felix Ng
Felix Ng first started writing in regards to the blockchain business by way of the lens of a playing business journalist and editor in 2015. He has since moved into masking the blockchain area full-time. He’s most thinking about progressive blockchain expertise aimed toward fixing real-world challenges.
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