By November 2024, Thorbjornsen, who describes himself as “a bit flamboyant,” was calling himself THORChain’s CEO (“chief energy officer”) and the “master of the memes” in a video from Binance Blockchain Week, an industry conference in Dubai. You need “strong memetic energy,” he says in the video, “to create the community, to create the cult.” Cults imply centralized leadership, and since outing himself as “leena,” Thorbjornsen has publicly appeared to helm the project, 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 received death threats. “I stirred it up. Do I regret it? Who knows?” he said when we met in Australia. “It’s caused a lot of chaos.”
But, he added, “this is the bed that I’ve laid.” When we spoke again, months later, he backtracked, saying he “got sucked into” defending THORChain in 2024 and 2025 because he was involved from 2018 to 2021 and has “a perspective on how the protocol operates.”
Centralized?
Ryan Treat, a retired US Army veteran, woke up one morning in January 2025 to some disturbing activity on X. “My heart sank,” he says. THORFi, the THORChain program he’d used to earn interest on the bitcoin he’d planned to save for his retirement, had frozen all accounts—but that didn’t make sense.
THORFi featured a lending and saving program said to give users “complete control” and self-custody of their crypto, meaning they could withdraw it at any time.
Treat was no crypto amateur. He bought his first bitcoin at around “$5 apiece,” he says, and had always kept it off centralized exchanges that would maintain custody of his wallets. He liked THORChain because it claimed to be decentralized and permissionless. “I got into bitcoin because I wanted to have government-less money,” he says.
We were told it was decentralized. Then you wake up one morning and read this guy had an admin mimir.
Many who’d used THORFi lending and saving programs felt similarly. Users I interviewed differentiated THORChain from centralized lending platforms like BlockFi and Celsius, both of which offered extraordinarily high yields before filing for bankruptcy in 2022. “I viewed THORChain as a decentralized system where it was safer,” says Halsey Richartz, a Florida-based THORFi creditor, with “vanilla, 1% passive yield.” Indeed, users I spoke with hadn’t felt the need to monitor their THORFi deposits. “Only your key can be used to withdraw your funds,” the product’s marketing materials insisted. “Savers can withdraw their position to native assets at any time.”
So on January 9, when the “leena” account announced that an admin key had been used to pause withdrawals, it took THORFi users by surprise—and seemed to contradict the marketing messaging around decentralization. “We were told that it was decentralized, and you wake up one morning and read an article that says ‘This guy, JP, had an admin mimir,’” says Treat, referring to Thorbjornsen, “and I’m like, ‘What the fuck is an admin mimir?’”
