Founder Spotlight: CodeHans

THORChain Intern

17 Feb 2026 — 7 min read

Part I: Formation

As we understand it, you started in crypto by working with Ethereum back in 2016. Is that right?

Yeah, that’s correct. I’ve got a really vivid memory of sitting in this tiny flat, basically a little attic space where I could barely stand up straight. I was clicking through TechCrunch and came across an article about The DAO, the original DAO, and how it was only possible on Ethereum. It went into what it enabled and why it mattered, and I remember thinking this is an incredibly technical piece of technology.

At the time, I was heads down on a startup, but as soon as I read that article I thought, alright, this is awesome. I need to download it, compile it, and start participating in this network. I completely caught the bug.

Did you build anything in those early days?

Yeah. My co-founder and I pulled together a team of some of the earliest Solidity developers. Solidity had only been around for a few months and nobody really had product market fit yet. The DAO was one of the first major contracts deployed on Ethereum, so it wasn’t clear what people were going to want or what would really take off.

So what did you decide to build?

We put together a smart contract agency. Our thinking was that smart contracts would be consumed like a library, lots of small modules you’d deploy when you needed them to interact with other people. That’s not exactly how things ended up playing out, but it was fun and we learned a lot from it.

Was there something specific that disillusioned you, or were you a believer from the start?Adoption and technical challenges didn’t really bother me. I’d been operating startups my whole life. I’ve been officially employed for about six months in total, so uncertainty never really unsettled me. I could see a clear path forward for the technology.

Part II: Exposure

So what did bother you?

The ICO wave. People would put together a whitepaper and then raise tens or hundreds of millions, sometimes even billions, for basically nothing. I’d done a small amount of work for the Ethereum Foundation back then, and when you met people there you could tell they were genuinely trying to build something meaningful. Then you had everyone else piggybacking on that, trying to exploit it, scam, or raise money without substance. I don’t think I was entrenched enough or committed enough to stick around through that phase.

You stepped away around 2017 and have said that period felt like the antithesis of what attracted you to crypto. Is that fair?

Yeah, exactly. The promise of permissionless, trustless coordination and the way Ethereum’s consensus model worked were incredible problems being solved. Then ICO mania came along and made a mockery of it.

You got back into crypto around 2021 by co-founding Kujira, with a focus on fair, user-owned financial systems. What was the founding vision from your side?

What became clear to me leading up to 2021 was how smart contract platforms were actually being used and what the real value proposition was. Fundamentally, it was disintermediation, meaning that people can access the same financial tools that were previously gated through things like KYC, investor accreditation, capital requirements, or expensive legal structures. This technology removes those barriers, both at a process level and a cost level.

How did that translate into Kujira’s mission?

We wanted to build tools that gave everyone access to financial products and services that had previously been inaccessible for one reason or another. Our slogan was everyone deserves to be a whale. It’s very crypto branded, but the meaning was simple. We wanted equal access.

Even access to things that didn’t exist before?

Absolutely. There are financial products that can only exist because of crypto. And even when products technically existed before, access to them wasn’t fair or open.

Can you give an example?

Liquidations. With Orca and liquidations, we shined a light on what actually happens when someone gets liquidated. Before that, it was just something that happened to you. We exposed that process and gave everyone the opportunity to participate.

Part III: Stewardship

What are the biggest lessons you learned from Kujira that you’re now applying with Rujira?

There are a lot of lessons. I tend to look at things primarily from a technical point of view. With Kujira, we had the opportunity to re-architect from the ground up and fix a lot of those early decisions compounded into real tech debt. Once you stack enough products on top, you can’t really fix it anymore. That gave us the opportunity to tear everything down and rebuild it properly.

We had some teething issues, but the architecture we have now, along with better build processes and pipelines, allows us to build a consumer-grade application with a fully decentralized, permissionless backend. That’s genuinely hard to do in crypto. You don’t control block production or versioning like you do in Web2, so it takes a lot more engineering.

On the operational side, we also learned a lot. We got some things wrong early on. With hindsight and more experienced people involved, we’ve put better checks and balances in place. A lot of teams either get lucky and disappear or give up when things get hard. The people who stick around and keep building through the hard parts are the ones you want in this space.

How did the transition to building Rujira on THORChain come about, and why did THORChain feel like the right foundation?

It happened pretty quickly. We were having funding discussions, and I reached out to JP and asked how he’d feel about migrating Kujira’s products. After a few conversations, it all started to make sense.

The biggest limitation with Kujira as a Cosmos-SDK Layer 1 was access to real liquidity. Cosmos is a great stack, very safe and expressive, but it sits outside where most liquidity lives. That was always a constraint.

One of the first things I did was adapt the asset model so it was compatible with smart contracts. That meant we could bring the contracts over directly. Suddenly, any chain connected to THORChain could participate in DeFi using the same contracts.

While reviewing the THORChain codebase, I realized what was possible. The way it represents and interacts with transactions from connected chains made the path forward very clear. It unlocked the vision for a unified omni-chain DeFi experience that just isn’t possible anywhere else. That’s only possible because THORChain has spent years building the underlying infrastructure.

How did you originally get involved with THORChain?

There’s always been overlap between the THORChain and Kujira communities, probably going back to the Terra days. It was always on my radar, but while we were building Kujira, I didn’t have much time to look around.

In early to mid-2024, I started exploring ways to connect Kujira to more chains, ideally Bitcoin. I was looking at various bridging technologies, and everything just lined up at the right time. It was a perfect confluence of events that led to Rujira.

Did regulatory and political pressure influence how you thought about adoption?

Yes, especially early on with Kujira. A lack of regulatory clarity pushes teams toward anonymity, which creates a perfect environment for scammers. It has the opposite effect of what regulators want.

Clear rules would allow more builders to operate openly and build trust. That said, even fully doxxed teams can still behave badly, so there are no perfect solutions.

What’s your North Star, and how does Rujira embody those principles?

It goes back to Kujira’s founding principles. As much as possible, we’ve always tried to stand by token holders. That sometimes meant making very hard decisions.

The transition to Rujira was difficult, but walking away would have been easier. Instead, we chose to push through and keep building the fair financial system we originally set out to create. Over time, you gather people who share that vision and have the grit to see it through. Eventually, that culture becomes embedded and hard to shake.

What are you most excited about shipping over the next phase of Rujira?

We’re getting very close to a complete DeFi suite. That includes spot trading, perpetuals, margin, borrowing, lending, and liquidations.

The next big step is concentrated liquidity integrated directly into the order book. Because we’re not using a bonding curve model, we can do more interesting things. We’re working on custom-curve liquidity, where liquidity providers define not just a range but the curve itself. That opens the door to more advanced strategies and stronger app-layer liquidity.

That liquidity can also directly improve THORChain’s ability to quote and win trades across aggregators. There’s more coming there, but we’ll share details when it’s ready.

Can you explain the Rujira DeFi suite in simple terms?

It’s a unified crypto financial experience, similar to what you’d get on a centralized exchange, but community-owned, transparent, and fair.

When you get liquidated on a centralized platform, your margin is simply taken. On Rujira, liquidation rules are transparent and user-defined. The system is designed to liquidate at the best possible price, return as much as possible to the user, and distribute any fees or profits back to the protocol and its stakeholders. It’s an ecosystem users can actually own part of.

Are there any trends in crypto that concern you or create opportunity?

There’s been a lot of consolidation. Teams are shutting down, merging, or losing momentum. At first, that feels unsettling, but it can actually be an advantage for teams that stay focused and keep building.

Within the THORChain and Rujira ecosystem, we’re well positioned. THORChain is profitable, we’re well capitalized, and the community and teams are motivated to deliver. Surviving and building through contraction often puts you in a stronger position on the other side.

What’s the best alpha you can share right now?

Concentrated liquidity is coming next. After that, we have something very exciting to share with the community. We’re also moving more trading onto credit accounts, increasing caps, improving borrowing and lending yields, and unlocking more activity across the system. Over the next couple of months, a lot of pieces start coming together.

Any call to action for readers?

Follow the main Rujira account, the intern account, and get involved. Start by learning how things work, then try the platform. Rujira supports a wide range of wallets, so it’s easy to jump in. Feedback is always welcome.

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