How THORChain Came to Dominate DeFi with Founder JP Thor

There aren't many crypto founders who willingly dox themselves — but then again, THORChain's JP Thorbjornsen isn't your typical crypto founder.

For years, the man who is now known to the community as JP Thor, posed as an anonymous female community member online as he worked with other founding contributors to build out one of the most popular DeFi protocols in the industry.

He also doesn't like calling himself a founder.

"Everyone who's been involved in THORChain is technically a founder of THORChain. Over the last seven years, it still has not gotten to a mature product that its end state. It's probably five years away from that," he said in a new Coinage interview. "I want to make that very point clear. There is no the founder of THORChain and I certainly don't call myself that. There is a bunch of people who have put a lot of time, effort and resources to make this dream of decentralized liquidity true and working and feasible."

But as THORChain accelerates into its next phase, JP Thor is certainly doing some founder things. After DeFi app layer Kujira ran into some debt issues, JP Thor stepped in with $3 million of his own funds to backstop a deal to integrate the project directly into the THORChain ecosystem.

As Thor explains, he's entered a new M&A mentality to find projects that will help bring more growth to THORChain. As Coinage has covered in the past, their strategy to function as the protocol back-end enabling cross-chain swaps in wallets like Trust and ShapeShift has already proven incredibly successful.

"We have a four-year engaged plan together to build out a THORChain app layer, and KUJI [token] will be the representative asset of that app," he said about the token that once powered the separate Kujira ecosystem.

Just recently, THORChain powered nearly $1 billion in weekly permissionless swaps. To be exact, just over $720 million was processed during the week of August 5. On the year, volumes have totaled $23 billion across more than 16 million transactions. In large part, the momentum has been driven by more users of more wallets utilizing THORChain — sometimes without even knowing it.

As Thor explains, the foresight of implementing the protocol with various wallet providers, who have also now earned millions in affiliate swap fees, was always part of the strategy to align incentives in attracting volumes. The plan has in large part payed off with some of the most attractive swaps in crypto.

"Once you win the wallets, you basically played your card," Thor said. "As long as Thorchain is stable and reliable and secure, they will never need to do another integration. So at this point, I think the protocol has won. It skated to where the puck will be in five years."

Now, Thor is building out an improvement over many of the wallets in use today in Vultisig, which seeks to set a new standard in common sense multi-sig cross-chain wallet tech.

"Account abstraction, which you see in the EVM land only works for EVM chains," he said. "You need a proper multi-chain multi-factor multi-asset wallet, and that's multisig. And we're trying to establish it as a cosigning wallet standard, so you can start a transaction on one device and finish on the other."

Attention from those watching is now focused on what chains might be added to THORChain next. This week, TRON founder Justin Sun replied to a tweet saying he would be "Happy to support" a new integration. When asked by Coinage for a timeline, Thor said to stay tuned.

"All I'll say [is] a Telegram chat has been opened," he said. "And once the Telegram chat is open, if there's a group chat, it's getting done."

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