The Thorchain team made news recently by tweeting concern about Paypal buying BitGo. @rollandthomas, a short time ago, mentioned this in his latest video and requested my input about this. This post is my response.

Firstly, some links for reference:

• Cointelegraph article - Paypal rumored to be eying acquisition of crypto custodian BitGo

• Thorchain's tweet on the subject.

• An interview by Chris Blec on the trust bubble youtube channel With a Thorchain researcher JR. This is quite in depth, runs for 1 1/2 hours and covers many other topics also.

Philosophical objections.

Thorchain is designed from first principles. It has been built from the ground up and the team have thrown out any pre-conceptions and are trying to build something without any compromises. Philosophically, The team seem to prefer designing their protocol for native BTC as opposed to Wrapped BTC. The belief is that by wrapping BTC, the nature of the asset is fundamentally altered, and the true nature of BTC is lost with the need to trust a third party to custody the BTC, and issue a representation on another chain.

The specific mention in their tweet of Paypal as a bad actor, seems to come from a place of general mistrust of mainstream finance and particularly a belief that Paypal is a company not to be trusted. I guess it is along the lines of when Facebook where looking to launch its crypto, this sort of stuff may help adoption, but to the purists it is the mainstream that crypto is trying to fight against, taking over and muscling into the space.

Much of what I have seen from the Thorchain team appears to come from a fairly anti-establishment place. They are trying to maintain some anonymity of the team, setting up a protocol with no KYC on the base layer, and wanting the project community run and built, with a group of anonymous nodes running and securing the network. It is designed to ultimately be governance minimal, with everything needed built in to the code. The dev team have even designed in to the project their own obsolescence, with a pathway to full community control over the project - with no "central dev team" or project managers, or however you want to call a central power building the project.

Long story short, I feel (and this is just my interpretation - I'm don't have any connection to the team) that Thorchain is being built by a group of anti-establishment dev's, designing a project from first principles, with a belief that native assets are always superior to wrapped assets. They distrust the mainstream, fiat firms trying to muscle in to crypto, and prefer self-custody over centralized custody as a core principle.

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Thanks for reading,

JK.