Upper-middle-class homes give way to vineyards, and Thorbjornsen points out our landing spot outside a winery. People visiting for lunch walk outside. “They’re going to ask for a shot now,” he says, used to the attention drawn by his luxury helicopter, emblazoned with the tail letters “BTC” for bitcoin (the price tag of $5 million in Australian dollars — $3.5 million in US dollars today — was perhaps reasonable for someone who claims a previous crypto project made more than AU$400 million, although he also says those funds were tied up in the company).
Thorbjornsen is a founder of THORChain, a blockchain through which users can swap one cryptocurrency for another and earn fees from making those swaps. THORChain is permissionless, so anyone can use it without getting prior approval from a centralized authority. As a decentralized network, the blockchain is built and run by operators located across the globe, most of whom use pseudonyms.
During its early days, Thorbjornsen himself hid behind the pseudonym “leena” and used an AI-generated female image as his avatar. But around March 2024, he revealed that he, an Australian man in his mid-30s, with a rural Catholic upbringing, was the mind behind the blockchain. More or less.
If there is a central question around THORChain, it is this: Exactly who is responsible for its operations? Blockchains as decentralized as THORChain are supposed to offer systems that operate outside the centralized leadership of corruptible governments and financial institutions. If a few people have outsize sway over this decentralized network — one of a handful that operate at such a large scale — it’s one more blemish on the legacy of bitcoin’s promise, which has already been tarnished by capitalistic political frenzy.
Who’s responsible for THORChain matters because in January last year, its users lost more than $200 million worth of their cryptocurrency in US dollars after THORChain transactions and accounts were frozen by a singular admin override, which users believed was not supposed to be possible given the decentralized structure. When the freeze was lifted, some users raced to pull their money out. The following month, a team of North Korean hackers known as the Lazarus Group used THORChain to move roughly $1.2 billion of stolen ethereum taken in the infamous hack of the Dubai-based crypto exchange Bybit.
Thorbjornsen explains away THORChain’s inability to stop the movement of stolen funds, or prevent a bank run, as a function of its decentralized and permissionless nature. The lack of executive powers means that anyone can use the network for any reason, and arguably there’s no one to hold accountable when even the worst goes down.
But when the worst did go down, nearly everyone in the THORChain community, and those paying attention to it in channels like X, pointed their fingers at Thorbjornsen. A lawsuit filed by the THORChain creditors who lost millions in January 2025 names him. A former FBI analyst and North Korea specialist, reflecting on the potential repercussions for helping move stolen funds, told me he wouldn’t want to be in Thorbjornsen’s shoes.
THORChain was designed to make decisions based on votes by node operators, where two-thirds majority rules.
That’s why I traveled to Australia — to see if I could get a handle on where he sees himself and his role in relation to the network he says he founded.
According to Thorbjornsen, he should not be held responsible for either event. THORChain was designed to make decisions based on votes by node operators — people with the computer power, and crypto stake, to run a cluster of servers that process the network’s transactions. In those votes, a two-thirds majority rules.
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