Founder Spotlight - Chad Barraford
1) What was “THE MOMENT” that made you leave traditional tech and go all-in on crypto?
There was a very clear aha moment for me. In 2017, after I sold almost everything I owned and decided to travel the world, I met two guys in my first month who were deep into crypto, mostly Ethereum at the time. They started explaining Bitcoin, Ethereum, and crypto more broadly.
I’d actually heard about Bitcoin a couple of years earlier, but like most people, I dismissed it the first time. My mindset was that there was no way the U.S. government would ever allow a competing currency to rise up against the dollar. At that point I hadn’t yet understood how decentralized Bitcoin really was, or how hard it is to shut down.
At the same time, I was bored and uninspired by the work I was doing in Web2. I felt boxed in. I was constantly clashing with colleagues and managers because I wanted to be more innovative and work on more interesting things. I’ve always liked playing with difficult technical problems just for the sake of learning, so blockchain immediately caught my attention.
I built a sandbox project called Black, basically a “blockchain Slack,” just to understand how blockchains worked from first principles. I started by building a blockchain from scratch, experimenting with proof-of-work and proof-of-authority, just as a way to learn. Through that process, I realized this was one of the most foundational technologies of my lifetime, alongside the internet and AI.
What really clicked for me was the potential to reshape finance, making it decentralized, transparent, open, and fair. Human society has never had truly open and fair financial systems. Once I understood that, I went deeper and deeper into crypto, contributed to things like Lightning, and eventually found JP. The rest is history.
2) Who do you think Satoshi is?
I don’t know who Satoshi is, but I do know someone who was around before Bitcoin launched and who was part of the cryptography circles Satoshi moved in. That person helped review the code before launch, bought Bitcoin from Hal Finney on day three, and mined Bitcoin in 2009. So this person definitely knew Satoshi through direct communication.
When I asked him who he thought Satoshi was, he said that based on the references Satoshi used and the timing of their communications, he believed Satoshi was probably Canadian, likely on the East Coast, and probably in his 40s at the time. I trust that judgment more than most theories because this person had a much closer relationship with Satoshi than almost anyone else.
So I don’t know the identity, but my best guess is Canadian, East Coast.
3) What’s the THORChain origin story?
The problem THORChain was trying to solve goes back to one of crypto’s original values: no KYC, self-custody, privacy, and user control. But if you wanted to acquire Bitcoin, Ethereum, or stablecoins, you usually had to go through centralized exchanges, and that was completely at odds with crypto’s original ethos.
The deeper issue was that blockchains were intentionally designed as highly deterministic systems with no external awareness. They couldn’t really “talk” to other chains without risking consensus failures. So there was this huge open question: how do you exchange value across blockchains in a trustless way?
Atomic swaps were one early answer, using HTLCs, but they had major problems. Liquidity was terrible, price discovery was weak, and contracts often failed if prices moved before completion. ShapeShift tried to offer non-KYC cross-chain exchange in a centralized way, and it worked well until regulators forced them into KYC, which caused their volume to collapse.
JP and I met in Germany in 2019 at a Cosmos SDK hackathon in Berlin. I was actually there interviewing for a CTO role at another blockchain company, and JP was an advisor to that company. Before the hackathon started, JP asked what we should build. He’d already tried to start THORChain in 2018, but the tech stack just wasn’t ready yet. Things like GG18 cryptography and Cosmos tooling weren’t mature enough.
At the hackathon, the organizers hinted that a working cross-chain swapping prototype would be a very strong submission. So JP and I hacked on that idea for two days. I wrote the first lines of code for THORChain there. We ended up being one of the winning teams, and that was really the birth of the project. A week later, JP launched the RUNE token on Binance Chain, and later it moved to its own chain. That was the beginning.
4) What major crypto industry shifts have impressed you the most, and what problems still persist?
One thing that’s impressed me is the Lightning Network. I think it’s a technically inspired system built by very smart people. It’s an elegant answer to a real problem.
But to be honest, I haven’t been that impressed by most of what the industry has done. A lot of people got something fundamentally wrong. Blockchains aren’t here to replace Web2. They’re here to extend what’s possible. People used to say blockchain would replace Twitter, YouTube, Uber, Airbnb, and everything else. That was never realistic.
A blockchain is basically a database, just with special properties that make it useful for a narrow but critically important set of applications: decentralization, permissionlessness, and transparency. Those properties matter enormously for things like money, and money is one of the biggest systems in human society.
That’s why Bitcoin is so important. It made decentralized money possible in a way no previous technology could. AI is also going to be huge, but it won’t change money the same way blockchain can. AI makes things humans already do faster and more efficient. Blockchain makes entirely new things possible.
So the biggest persistent problem is that too many people are still trying to build blockchain versions of things that don’t need blockchain, instead of focusing on what only blockchain can uniquely enable.
5) How does THORChain need to evolve over the next few years?
THORChain needs greater efficiency, support for more assets, and support for more chains. In the long term, I see it as one of the foundational infrastructure layers of crypto, providing a fast, efficient, decentralized way to move capital without humans having to sit in the middle of the process.
As crypto becomes more embedded in everyday life, people will need seamless ways to move between assets. Most mainstream users still don’t hold their own crypto directly today. Many just have ETF exposure. But over time that will change. Wallets will become normal. NFTs and tokenized assets will eventually have real-world utility, even if most current NFT activity is mostly speculative nonsense.
As society naturally moves toward using wallets for more things, the need for instant, trustless asset exchange becomes critical. THORChain’s role is to make that happen in the background.
The end goal is that users don’t even know THORChain exists. They should just be able to send value from one chain to another, from one asset to another, directly from their wallet, with no friction. It should feel like magic. You press send, and it works. The complexity should disappear into the background.
That’s the long-term goal. In the short term, of course, there are competitors, new features, and execution challenges. But in the long run, THORChain succeeds by becoming invisible infrastructure.
6) Will permissionless protocols eventually have to compromise with regulation?
No, I don’t think the industry has to compromise in that way. I think traditional finance is slowly on its way out, not tomorrow, but over time.
Whenever a transformative technology shows up, the incumbent players are slow to adopt it because they already dominate the old system. Banks already control traditional finance, so they don’t have a strong incentive to rethink everything. But crypto is objectively better in many ways: speed, performance, cost, transparency, and reduced opportunities for corruption or collusion.
What I think will happen is that banks and institutions will try to enter this new world, and they’ll have some success initially. But ultimately, they’ll just act as a gateway drug into self-custody and decentralized finance. Once people get used to holding digital assets in wallets, even if it starts with some bank-issued stablecoin, the leap to holding Bitcoin and other crypto directly becomes much smaller.
Over time, more people will realize Bitcoin is a better asset than gold or fiat in many situations, especially in an environment of inflation, instability, and bad policymaking. That transition will be slow, probably 20 to 30 years, but I think it’s the natural direction things are moving.
7) What excites you most about the intersection of AI and crypto?
Chad: What excites me is that blockchains give computers, for the first time, the ability to hold and transfer value. Before crypto, computers couldn’t really have bank accounts or autonomously control money in a meaningful way.
I was talking about this as early as 2020 in the context of autonomous systems. Imagine a Tesla taxi driving around, picking up passengers, getting paid in crypto, then driving itself to a charging station, paying for electricity in crypto, and continuing to operate all autonomously. That kind of loop becomes possible because blockchain gives software economic agency.
I absolutely think AI agents using crypto payments will become a major thing. They’ll likely use THORChain at some point too. But we’re still too early. There’s too much room for hallucinations, prompt injections, and mistakes. We’ve already seen examples where AI agents made bad payment decisions or got exploited.
So yes, AI agents moving money and making microtransactions will happen, but not safely at scale yet. We probably need another one to three years before it becomes more reliable.
I don’t think AI will really live on blockchains, but I absolutely think AI will use blockchains all the time, especially for payments and micropayments.
8) What’s your message to THORChain skeptics?
I’d say that the problems THORChain has had over the years aren’t evidence that the core model is broken. None of the issues we’ve had point to the foundational architecture, the original whitepaper concepts, or the core tokenomics being invalid.
A lot of the problems came from trying to build new things on top of the foundation, things that didn’t work out as hoped, or code that wasn’t secure enough, like some of the hacks in 2021. But the core protocol itself has worked very well.
A good indicator is that people are still paying to use it. In February alone, THORChain generated about $1 million in real revenue because it provides a service people genuinely want. That means it found product-market fit.
It’s easy for critics to point at a problem from six months ago, a year ago, or five years ago and use that to dismiss the whole thing. But that’s not how reality works. If you look at the fundamentals, what THORChain actually does and how it functions, it’s still in very strong shape.
9) What’s your view on governance and DAOs?
I’m somewhat bearish on DAOs as a general-purpose governance model.
One reason is that DAO participation is usually tiny. If 8% turnout is considered good, that already tells you something. Founders often hold more than that, which means they can sometimes effectively decide outcomes alone. That shows how weak the model can be.
The other issue is that pure democracy doesn’t work that well in practice. Most successful political systems aren’t pure democracies. They’re representative systems. That matters because most people don’t fully understand the issues they’re voting on, and they can be manipulated by fear, misinformation, or narratives. Brexit is one example Chad referenced of people voting on something without really understanding the consequences.
DAOs also often aren’t really “one person, one vote” systems. They’re “one token, one vote,” which really means “one dollar, one vote.” That gives more influence to the wealthy, which is obviously problematic.
With THORChain, we didn’t want governance to be based on any random person holding RUNE and voting on highly technical issues they don’t understand. THORChain is a very complicated protocol. Instead, node operators, who have large amounts of capital bonded into the system and a strong incentive for it to succeed, are better positioned to make decisions.
Even then, governance is never perfect. Our approach was to remove governance as much as possible and replace it with mathematical systems wherever we could. The incentive pendulum is one example of trying to solve coordination through formulas instead of constant voting.
So my view is that math is usually better than governance when possible. Governance should be used only where necessary.
