By November 2024, Thorbjornsen, who describes himself as “a bit flamboyant,” was calling himself THORChain’s CEO (“chief power officer”) and the “grasp of the memes” in a video from Binance Blockchain Week, an business convention in Dubai. You want “sturdy memetic power,” he says within the video, “to create the neighborhood, to create the cult.” Cults suggest centralized management, and since outing himself as “leena,” Thorbjornsen has publicly appeared to helm the mission, with one interviewer deeming him the “THORChain Satoshi” (an allusion to the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin).
One consequence of going public as a face of the protocol: He’s acquired demise threats. “I stirred it up. Do I remorse it? Who is aware of?” he stated after we met in Australia. “It’s precipitated numerous chaos.”
However, he added, “that is the mattress that I’ve laid.” Once we spoke once more, months later, he backtracked, saying he “acquired sucked into” defending THORChain in 2024 and 2025 as a result of he was concerned from 2018 to 2021 and has “a perspective on how the protocol operates.”
Centralized?
Ryan Deal with, a retired US Military veteran, awoke one morning in January 2025 to some disturbing exercise on X. “My coronary heart sank,” he says. THORFi, the THORChain program he’d used to earn curiosity on the bitcoin he’d deliberate to save lots of for his retirement, had frozen all accounts—however that didn’t make sense.
THORFi featured a lending and saving program stated to present customers “full management” and self-custody of their crypto, that means they might withdraw it at any time.
Deal with was no crypto novice. He purchased his first bitcoin at round “$5 apiece,” he says, and had all the time stored it off centralized exchanges that might keep custody of his wallets. He favored THORChain as a result of it claimed to be decentralized and permissionless. “I acquired into bitcoin as a result of I needed to have government-less cash,” he says.
We have been informed it was decentralized. You then get up one morning and browse this man had an admin mimir.
Many who’d used THORFi lending and saving applications felt equally. Customers I interviewed differentiated THORChain from centralized lending platforms like BlockFi and Celsius, each of which provided terribly excessive yields earlier than submitting for chapter in 2022. “I seen THORChain as a decentralized system the place it was safer,” says Halsey Richartz, a Florida-based THORFi creditor, with “vanilla, 1% passive yield.” Certainly, customers I spoke with hadn’t felt the necessity to monitor their THORFi deposits. “Solely your key can be utilized to withdraw your funds,” the product’s advertising supplies insisted. “Savers can withdraw their place to native belongings at any time.”
So on January 9, when the “leena” account introduced that an admin key had been used to pause withdrawals, it took THORFi customers abruptly—and appeared to contradict the advertising messaging round decentralization. “We have been informed that it was decentralized, and also you get up one morning and browse an article that claims ‘This man, JP, had an admin mimir,’” says Deal with, referring to Thorbjornsen, “and I’m like, ‘What the fuck is an admin mimir?’”
