Food Poisoning - The Daily Gwei #68
Something smells fishy.
Well the SushiSwap saga just gets crazier as over the weekend we saw the creator (Chef Nomi) sell off the dev fund that had accrued over the previous few days (approximately $13 million worth). This obviously came as a shock to most of the SushiSwap community as the Chef had stated he wouldn’t be dumping the dev fund as he’s a “good guy”. Well, you know what they say, nice (good) guy’s finish last.
What’s even more ironic about this is that Nomi (and the SushiSwap community) had been railing against Uniswap for being a “VC backed” project and Nomi even directly went up against the founder of Uniswap, Hayden Adams, claiming that he had “everything” while Nomi had nothing. Well, now Nomi has made much more money from Uniswap than Hayden ever has (since SushiSwap is basically a clone of Uniswap).
Anyway, after Nomi dumped his tokens, he stated that he would continue working on SushiSwap and transfer ownership of the protocol to a multi-sig of community members. But before this could happen, Chef Nomi went rogue once again and transferred control of the protocol to Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) who is the CEO of FTX and Alameda Research (and also the largest SUSHI farmer and holder). Since transferring ownership, Chef Nomi has been pretty quiet across his various social media channels.
So now the ball is in SBF’s court and he’s currently free to do whatever he wants with the protocol. He outlined his plan here which is to basically cancel the current migration of Uniswap LP’s to SushiSwap (done), initiate a new one (done), and start the process of transferring ownership of SushiSwap to new multi-sig owners (in progress). Though since SBF is such a large holder of SUSHI, giving up control of the protocol via the multi-sig might not matter since he could just swing the vote on governance proposals with his holdings anyway. Whether he will exercise this power or not remains to be seen. It’s also worth noting that SBF has also been pushing for SushiSwap to be ported over to Serum (the “decentralized” exchange he’s building on Solana).
Now, this piece wouldn’t be complete without addressing all of the speculation around the identity of Chef Nomi. As I’m sure most of you know, there is a prominent theory that Chef Nomi is actually Sorawit Suriyakarn (CTO of Band Protocol). This is based on a bunch of evidence (more here) that the community has uncovered in the last 48 hours. Of course, both Sorawit and the Band team have denied these allegations and key people in the community have also come to Sorawit’s defense. Though, Sorawit has admitted that he was involved in the project to some extent (helping with the code) but still denied being involved in any way beyond that.
I’ll be honest, the evidence is quite damning and there are too many coincidences to be ignored. I’m still personally on the fence about it and I’d say there’s a 50% chance that Sorawit is Chef Nomi - I’m sure the truth will come out sooner or later but until then, I would encourage people not to send things like death threats or insults towards Sorawit.
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.