THORChain Founder And His Plan To ‘Vampire Attack’ All DeFi

Jon-Paul Torjornsen, who goes by the name “JP Thor”, recently confessed to something he had been hiding for a long time.

He is the founder of a well-known layer-1 cross-chain protocol – THORChain – and while doing so, he pretended to be a fully-fledged woman named “Lena” for six years.

Now, a few months after revealing his identity, Torjornsen has revealed his next crusade: “vampire-attacking” bad players in the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry by building his own super app.

“I'm going full vampire on Defi to wake everyone up,” Thorbjornsen told the magazine. “I'm launching a six-month attack on everything in DeFi.”

In crypto, a vampire attack occurs when a project offers huge incentives or benefits to extort users or steal from another project, draining the life out of it. In fact, ugliness can completely shut down a project.

“People are paying their money to chase incentives and basically attack other protocols,” says Thorbjornsen.

At X, Thorbjornsen says this involves social, administrative and fluid pool migration “attacks”.

“They're all tied up; they're all slow carpets, and I'm sick of the cruelty and the profiteering and nobody building anything meaningful.”

Thorbjornsen's next step after that is to build DECASWAP, a DeFi super app that integrates all “trusted” DeFi protocols into one mega interface and aggregator.

His plan is to eventually merge 10-20 other projects and attract 100 million users, perhaps leaving others to fend for themselves.

“I'm doing a huge M&A. [merger and acquisition]; Everything I'm building is already there. I'm just folding into a huge brand; It's a big coordination exercise,” he says.

“So, I'm putting all of DeFi on ad, and we're going to attack them all.”

A few months after Thorbjornsen announced his founding of THORChain, a layer-1 decentralized protocol that allows users to exchange native assets between different blockchains without the need for encrypted or hashed assets.

He was also very busy in the midst of all this launching Vultisig, a self-managed multi-chain crypto wallet with built-in two-factor authentication, which gave birth to the idea of ​​WEWESWAP, a two-factor authentication focused on memecoin decentralized exchange.

JP Thorne reveals his sexuality

In March, Torjornsen revealed that he had been developing the protocol under the nickname “Lina” for six years.

“I wanted to build hardcore in the weeds. I didn't want to go to the conference. I don't want to go to panels, do circle-jerk founder retreats, or any of that nonsense.

“I built Lina as such a founder to send the protocol,” says Torjornsen.

THORChain was founded in It was released in mid-2018 and went live in June 2022 after four years of development. In March, the cross-chain protocol achieved more than $11 billion in exchange volume.

For some, this was a very sad time. “Lina” was a highly respected figure in the THORChain community and established herself as an administrator and lead developer, amassing a small following of her own.

“I actually created her on ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com,” says Thorbjornsen, a 33-year-old software engineer, referring to the AI ​​face generator launched by Uber in 2019.

“I wanted to prove a point: anyone can build a project based on their results.”

“Who you are, who you look like, what your image is should be completely irrelevant. You just have to be able to compete in the knowledge arena,” says Torjornsen.

For better or worse, the crypto industry has a tendency to idolize high-profile founders. For example, try talking about Ethereum without mentioning high-profile co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

In June 2017, a hoax about his death in a car accident fueled the ETH flash crash at the time – the price dropped 22% in a three-day period.

Even convicted felon Sam Bankman-Fried was inseparable from the crypto exchange he founded in the public eye. In the year When the exchange collapsed in November 2022 due to tainted customer funds, the reputations of both were in flames.

“[Projects] It should not be built around people and the people who are building to attach themselves to projects and strengthen their own public profile, should focus on the results of their intelligence.

The magazine asked if he felt he was treated differently as a woman, and Thorbjornsen said he was underrated at best.

“I was always treated with respect,” recalls Torjornsen. People called me ‘mom' all the time in Discord, and there was no sexism or anything, which was crazy.

“I think Lena was often underestimated. But once people saw the quality of her results, she was reassessed for who she really was.

In the year According to data from Forex Suggest in 2023, only three of the 50 most influential crypto CEOs are women, and triple-A data shows that 39% of crypto owners are women.

Torjornsen dreamed of going into space, but Bitcoin changed all that.

Torjornsen grew up among eight siblings on a small island off the coast of Australia's Northern Territory. He told the magazine that he dreamed of becoming an astronaut as a child.

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“I was reading science books and aviation books. My parents had a library for us children […] I wanted to explore the universe. I thought it was the next frontier,” says Torjornsen.

That mindset eventually led Torjornsen down a military path. In the year He joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 2007 and began training as a fighter pilot in 2012. After four years, he has accumulated more than 2,000 flight hours in training and deployments around the world.

But it wasn't until mid-2013 that Torjornsen's world started to turn upside down – he heard someone on stage at a startup conference talking about a bitcoin exchange and went to Google what it was.

“I just went and Googled it and read the white paper and that's when I was inspired. I was like, ‘This is literally going to change the world.'

In the year In 2017, Torjornsen left his career path in the Air Force and went all in on crypto.

That same year, he raised millions in Ether for what was then Australia's second-largest initial coin offering, CanYa, a blockchain-based marketplace where individuals can provide services (mow the lawn, do the dishes) and get paid in cryptocurrencies. .

The marketplace ultimately failed.

“I moved quickly and raised some money, but it was in the wrong direction. No one used the products. We built the product, but no one ever used it,” he recalls.

“And that's when I realized that the right thing to build, the strongest thing, is a decentralized exchange.”

But that doesn't mean the trial period is over.

Go to the shop

Although Thorbjornsen has some high crypto ambitions for the next five years, you will probably see him in the news soon.

At the Singapore Air Show in February, he announced plans to travel around the world with two helicopters.

Thorbjornsen and another pilot will fly from Darwin to the South Pole in the first quarter of 2026, covering 30,000 nautical miles in a 12-month journey.

It covers 50 countries on seven continents and crosses the equator three times.

“No one has done it before, but we have all the methods and machinery to do that. It only takes one person to step into the arena to do this.

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Felix Ng

Felix Ng first started writing about the blockchain industry through the lens of a gambling industry journalist and editor in 2015. Since then, he has moved on to cover the blockchain space full-time. He is very interested in innovative blockchain technology aimed at solving real-world challenges.