The rise of Sushiswap came swift as it enjoyed unparalleled hype last week after its launch, but it took only less than a week for that popularity to come tumbling down, precipitated by a single event which occurred over the weekend – Sushiswap’s leader, under the pseudonym of Chef Nomi, cashed out his devshares portion of the platform’s proprietary SUSHI token, a move which elicited outcry from the crypto community at large.
As previously reported, Sushiswap’s model has received some criticism for its many security flaws and the fact that over 50% of the total SUSHI supply lies in the hands of Sushiswap’s founders. Initially, that did not deter yield farmers one bit as the project raked up over $1.3 billion worth of assets that was locked on its platform. After Chef Nomi’s abrupt decision to cash out and a failure to explain himself properly, these farmers are definitely singing a different tune now.
Prominent crypto industry figures stepped forward to comment on the move, with Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum subtly hinting at Sushi investors to see the risky project for what it truly is, despite the noise generated by the project between Chef Nomi and others. Derivatives trading platform FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was more direct as he called Chef Nomi out immediately.
“First of all, Chef Nomi sucks. He hurt his project, his future potential and his followers,” Bankman-Fried said in the first of a series of tweets after.
He ended his spiel with a proposal to have Chef Nomi hand over all the keys and control of Sushiswap to someone else. In this case, Chef Nomi announced that he would hand Sushiswap over to Bankman-Fried. The FTX founder suggested to migrate Sushiswap onto Project Serum, which is built on the Solana blockchain. Since the news SUSHI’s price more than doubled from its low of $1.12. That is indeed some SUSHIPOWAH from all those involved in the Sushiswap project.
Speaking to Forbes via an exclusive interview, Bankman-Fried said, “Anonymous founding teams that have a lot of power, is a pretty scary quadrant to be in. To the extend that trust is necessary, you want them to be people that you trust and that have a track record. And if you are going with new or anonymous founders, you want to make sure that protocol is designed so they don’t have the ability renege. If you want to anonymously launch community, go ahead, just make sure you are on the same page as your community about that powers that you do or don’t have.”
It was a rather swift acquisition of Sushiswap on Bankman-Fried’s part, and as a small handful of community members suggested that this was all a huge conspiracy and a ploy by the FTX founder to gain control over Sushiswap, he retweeted a tweet by user Loomdart:
