Lorimer Jenkins

Lorimer Jenkins, born July 30, 2003, in Hertfordshire, UK, did not follow the conventional route into technology and entrepreneurship. Originally trained in acting and musical theatre, Jenkins discovered blockchain at the age of 17 and decided to chart his own course in the emerging crypto industry. Rather than attending a traditional university, he embarked on a determined self-directed journey to break into Web3.

In a bold move, Jenkins cold-emailed over 500 companies, founders, and investment firms. Only six replied, but one of those connections opened the door to an unpaid internship at a crypto venture fund. For three months, he immersed himself in venture capital operations before being offered a paid analyst role, contributing to both the fund’s VC and hedge fund arms for a year.

First Venture into Building

With a foundation in crypto investment research, Jenkins shifted toward product development. He built his first major project—a crypto transaction analytics platform—which attracted enough traction to secure a grant from the Polkadot and Kusama networks for full-time development. Over the course of a year, he worked as a solo founder with support from freelance contractors to grow the platform.

Joining Community Labs

Jenkins’ next leap came when he became the first external Fellow at Community Labs, an Arweave-focused incubator, shortly after the company’s seed round. In a pivotal decision, he returned his analytics grant to focus fully on building within the Arweave ecosystem. During his two years at Community Labs, he contributed to projects including Othent, Oases, subsidise-JS, and AO Ventures, gaining deeper experience in decentralized infrastructure development.

Conceiving LiquidOps

It was at Community Labs that Jenkins met Marton, founder of the ArConnect wallet. A conversation during a Cambridge visit sparked the idea of creating a decentralized finance protocol tailored for the Arweave ecosystem. They saw the untapped opportunity to enable lending, borrowing, and interest-earning on AR tokens, especially with the launch of AO, Arweave’s new decentralized computing layer.

Initially branded as Operation Liquidity, the project launched with extraordinary early momentum—$2 million in pledges within the first two hours of opening the waitlist, growing to $55 million in pledges from over 3,000 signups within months. Recognizing its potential, the team rebranded as LiquidOps, raised a $325,000 pre-seed round, and officially spun out from Community Labs as its first Fellow-founded venture.

Leading LiquidOps

Today, Lorimer Jenkins serves as Co-founder and CEO of LiquidOps, overseeing the development of a decentralized lending and borrowing protocol built on Arweave and AO. The platform aims to give token holders in the Arweave ecosystem new ways to put their assets to work, strengthening liquidity and enabling more robust DeFi infrastructure.

A Vision for the Future

Jenkins’ journey—from theatre student to crypto founder—underscores the value of persistence, unconventional thinking, and an opportunistic mindset in the fast-moving world of blockchain. With LiquidOps, he aims to position Arweave’s DeFi ecosystem as a major player in the broader Web3 economy, offering a scalable, transparent, and community-driven approach to decentralized finance.

• LiquidOps Co-Founder and CEO