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

He’s the founder of a well-known layer-1 cross-chain protocol — THORChain — and pretended to be a completely made-up woman called “Leena” for six years while doing it.

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

“I am vampire-attacking all of DeFi to wake everyone up,” Thorbjornsen tells Magazine. “I’m launching a six-month attack on everything in DeFi.”

In crypto, a vampire attack occurs when one project offers higher incentives or benefits to snatch users or liquidity from another project, sucking the life out of them. Really nasty ones could end up shuttering a project entirely. 

“I’m literally paying for people to move liquidity around to chase incentives and to basically attack other protocols,” says Thorbjornsen. 

On X, Thorbjornsen said this would involve a mix of social, governance and liquidity pool migration “attacks.” 

They’re all tied up; they’re all slow rugs, and I’m just sick of the grifting and the profiteering and no one building meaningful stuff.”

Thorbjornsen said the next phase after that would be to build DECASWAP, a DeFi super app that will package all “credible” DeFi protocols into a single mega interface and aggregator.

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

“I’m just doing a giant M&A [merger and acquisition]; everything I’m building already exists. I’m just folding it into a giant brand; it’s a giant coordination exercise,” he says.

So, I’m just putting all of DeFi on notice, and we’ll attack all of them.”

It comes just a few months after Thorbjornsen revealed his true identity as the founder of THORChain, a layer-1 decentralized protocol that allows users to trade native assets between different blockchains without the need for wrapped or pegged assets.

He’s also been pretty busy in between all of this, launching Vultisig, a self-custodial multichain crypto wallet with in-built two-factor authentication, which ended up unintentionally birthing the idea for a memecoin-focused decentralized exchange WEWESWAP.

JP Thor’s gender reveal

In March, Thorbjornsen revealed he had been building the protocol under the pseudonym “Leena” for the better part of six years.

I wanted to build hardcore, in the weeds. I didn’t want to go to conferences. I didn’t want to go to panels, do circle-jerk founder retreats or that nonsense.”

“I built up Leena as this kind of founder to ship the protocol,” says Thorbjornsen. 

THORChain was founded in mid-2018 and went live in June 2022 after four years of development. In March, the cross-chain protocol notched over $11 billion in swap volume, the first in its history, according to data from ViewBlock. 

For some, it was a heartbreaking moment. “Leena” was a highly respected figure in the THORChain community and presented “herself” as an admin and lead developer, garnering herself a little fanbase of her own. 

“I literally generated her on ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com,” Thorbjornsen says, referencing the AI face generator launched by a 33-year-old software engineer at Uber in 2019.

“I wanted to prove a point: that anyone could build a project based solely on the merits of their output.”

“It should be completely irrelevant who you are, who you look like, what your avatar is; you should just be able to literally compete in an arena of intelligence,” says Thorbjornsen.

For better or worse, the crypto industry tends to idolize its high-profile founders. For example, try talking about Ethereum without 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 at the time — where its price fell 22% over a span of three days. 

Even convicted felon Sam Bankman-Fried was nearly inseparable from the crypto exchange he founded in the public’s eye. The reputation of both burned together when the exchange collapsed in November 2022 due to misappropriated customer funds.

[Projects] shouldn’t be built around people, and the people who are building to try and attach themselves to projects and reinforce their own public profile, they should just be fluid and focus on the output of their intelligence.”

Magazine asked whether he felt he was treated any differently as a female, and Thorbjornsen said he was, at most, underestimated. 

“I was always treated with respect,” recalls Thorbjornsen. “People always addressed me as ‘ma’am’ in the Discord, and there was never any sexism or anything, which is pretty crazy.”

“I think, at most times, Leena was underestimated. But once people could see the quality of her outputs, then she was assessed correctly for who she was.” 

Data from Forex Suggest in 2023 found that only three of the 50 most influential crypto CEOs are women, and Triple-A data shows around 39% of crypto owners are female. 

Thorbjornsen dreamed of going to space, but Bitcoin changed all that

Thorbjornsen grew up on a small island off the coast of Australia’s Northern Territory among eight brothers and one sister. He tells Magazine he dreamed of becoming an astronaut as a kid. 

“I was reading science books and aviation books. My parents had a library to give to us kids […] I wanted to explore the universe. I thought that was the next frontier,” says Thorbjornsen. 

That thinking eventually led Thorbjornsen on a military path. He joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 2007 and began training as a fighter pilot in 2012. Four years later, he had accumulated over 2,000 flight hours in training and deployments around the world. 

But it was in mid-2013 when Thorbjornsen’s world began to flip — he heard someone on stage at a startup conference talking about a Bitcoin exchange and went home to Google what it was.

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

In 2017, Thorbjornsen abandoned his career path in the Air Force and went all-in on crypto. 

That same year, he raised millions in Ether in what was Australia’s second-largest initial coin offering at the time to launch CanYa, a blockchain-based marketplace where individuals can offer services (mowing the lawn, doing the dishes) and receive payment in cryptocurrencies.

The marketplace ultimately failed. 

“I moved quickly and raised some money, but it was a misdirection. Nobody used the products. We built the product, but nobody ever used it,” he recalls. 

“And it was during that time period that I realized the actual thing to build, the hardcore thing, was a decentralized exchange.”

But that’s not to say his piloting days are over. 

Get to the chopper

While Thorbjornsen has some lofty crypto ambitions for the next five years, you’ll probably see him on the news soon.

In February, he announced at the Singapore Airshow that he was now planning an expedition with two helicopters to circumnavigate the globe.

Thorbjornsen and another 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 in a 12-month journey. 

He’ll be covering 50 countries over seven continents and will cross the equator three times. 

“Nobody’s ever done it before, but we have all the means and machines to do that. It just takes someone to get in the arena to actually do it.” 

Source : Cointelegraph - Jul 24, 2024