THORChain Founder Plans to ‘Vampire Attack’ the Entire DeFi

John Paul Torbjornsen, also known as “JP Thor,” recently confessed something he had kept hidden for a long time.

He is the founder of THORChain, a well-known layer 1 cross-chain protocol, and while doing so, he pretended to be a woman named “Lina”, acting completely virtual for 6 years.

Now, just months after revealing his identity, Thorbjornsen has revealed his next crusade: building his own super app while “vampirizing” bad players in the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry.

“I’m going to vampire attack the entirety of DeFi and wake everyone up,” Thorbjornsen told the magazine. “I’m going to do a six-month assault on everything in DeFi.”

In crypto, a vampire attack occurs when one project offers higher incentives or benefits to another project in order to suck the life out of the other project by stealing users or liquidity from the other project. A really bad attack can even shut down the project entirely.

“I’m literally paying people to move liquidity to pursue incentives and basically attack other protocols,” Thorbjornsen said.

Regarding X, Thorbjornsen said it would involve a combination of social, governance, and liquidity pool migration “attacks.”

“They’re all tied up, they’re all slow-moving, and I’m tired of the fraud and the profiteering and no one building anything meaningful.”

Thorbjornsen said the next step is to build DECASWAP, a DeFi super app that packages all “trusted” DeFi protocols into a single mega interface and aggregator.

His plan is to eventually merge 10 to 20 different projects to get to 100 million users, and leave the rest to figure it out on their own.

“I’m just doing a huge merger and acquisition. Everything I’m building already exists. I’m just folding it into a huge brand. It’s a huge adjustment,” he says.

“So I’m going to put out a notice to the whole of DeFi and attack them all.”

This news comes just months after Torbjörnsen revealed his true identity as the founder of THORChain, a layer 1 decentralized protocol that allows users to trade native assets across different blockchains without the need for wrapped or pegged assets.

In between all this, he was also quite busy, launching Vultisig, a self-custodial multichain cryptocurrency wallet with built-in 2FA, which inadvertently gave birth to the idea of ​​WEWESWAP, a decentralized exchange centered around Mimecoin.

JP Thor’s Gender Reveal

In March, Thorbjornsen revealed that she had been building the protocol for nearly six years under the pseudonym “Leena.”

“I wanted to make hardcore, out of the weeds. I didn’t want to go to conferences. I didn’t want to go on panels. I didn’t want to do circle jerk founder retreats or any of that nonsense.”

“I raised Leena to be this kind of founder to provide the protocol,” Thorbjornsen said.

THORChain was founded in mid-2018 and launched in June 2022 after four years of development. According to data from ViewBlock, in March, this cross-chain protocol recorded a swap volume of over $11 billion for the first time in history.

It was a heartbreaking moment for some. “Lina” was a highly respected figure in the THORChain community, and had developed her own small fan base by presenting herself as an administrator and lead developer.

“I literally created her on ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com,” Thorbjornsen said, referring to the AI ​​face generator that Uber’s 33-year-old software engineer launched in 2019.

“I wanted to prove one point: that anyone can build a project solely on the merits of their own work.”

“It doesn’t matter who you are, who you look like, or what your avatar is. You literally have to be able to compete on the intelligence playing field,” says Thorbjornsen.

For better or worse, the cryptocurrency industry tends to idolize its famous founders. For example, try talking about Ethereum without mentioning its famous co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

In June 2017, fraudulent rumors surrounding his death in a car accident amplified the ETH crash at the time, causing the price to drop 22% over three days.

Even convicted criminal Sam Bankman-Fried was virtually inseparable from the cryptocurrency exchange he founded in the public eye, and the reputations of both exchanges were simmering together when they were embezzled in November 2022.

“(Projects) shouldn’t be built around people, the people building the project should be trying to attach themselves to the project and enhance their public profile, they should just be fluid and focus on the results of their intelligence.”

The magazine asked him if he felt treated differently as a woman, and Torbjornsen said he felt undervalued at best.

“I was always treated with respect,” Thorbjornsen recalls. “People would always call me ‘ma’am’ on Discord, and there was no sexism or anything like that. It was crazy.”

“I think Lina was underrated most of the time, but once people saw the quality of her output, she was recognized for who she is.”

According to Forex Suggest’s 2023 data, only three of the 50 most influential cryptocurrency CEOs are women, and according to Triple-A data, approximately 39% of cryptocurrency owners are women.

Thorbjornsen dreamed of going to space, but Bitcoin changed everything.

Thorbjornsen grew up on a small island off the coast of Australia’s Northern Territory with eight brothers and one sister. He told the magazine that as a child he dreamed of becoming an astronaut.

Also read

characteristic

Investing in Blockchain Games: Why VCs Are Betting Big

characteristic

Should we give our kids the ‘orange pill’? The case for Bitcoin children’s book

“I read science books and aviation books. My parents had a library that we gave to our children. (…) I wanted to explore space. I thought that was the next frontier,” says Thorbjornsen.

That thought eventually led Thorbjornsen to the military. He enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force in 2007 and began fighter pilot training in 2012. Four years later, he has accumulated more than 2,000 flight hours in training and deployments around the world.

But it was in mid-2013 that Torbjörnsen’s world started to turn upside down. He heard someone on stage at a startup conference talking about a Bitcoin exchange, and when he got home, he Googled what it was.

“I just Googled it and read the white paper, and it just hit me. I thought, ‘This is literally going to change the world.’”

In 2017, Torbjornsen gave up his career in the Air Force and went all-in on cryptocurrencies.

That same year, he raised millions of dollars in Ether through what was then Australia’s second-largest initial coin offering, launching CanYa, a blockchain-based marketplace where individuals could provide services (mowing lawns, washing dishes) and receive payment in cryptocurrency.

The market ultimately failed.

“I moved quickly to raise some money, but it was the wrong direction. No one was using the product. We had a product, but no one was using it,” he recalls.

“And it was during that period that I realized what I really needed to build, what was core to it, was a decentralized exchange.”

But that doesn’t mean his piloting career is over.

Go by helicopter

Torbjornsen has big ambitions for crypto over the next five years, and it’s likely he’ll be in the news soon.

He announced plans at the Singapore Airshow in February to circumnavigate the globe using two helicopters.

Torbjörnsen and one other pilot will take off from Darwin in the first quarter of 2026 and fly from the North Pole to the South Pole, covering 30,000 nautical miles over 12 months.

He plans to travel to 50 countries across seven continents and cross the equator three times.

“Nobody has ever done it before, but we have all the tools and machinery to do it. To actually do it, someone has to get into the arena.”

Subscribe

The most interesting articles on blockchain, delivered once a week.

Felix Yeah

Felix Ng first started writing about the blockchain industry in 2015 from the perspective of a gambling industry journalist and editor. Since then, he has been covering the blockchain field full-time. He is most interested in innovative blockchain technologies that aim to solve real-world problems.