0xMaki, a cofounder of SushiSwap explains how and why he got involved in this project forked from SushiSwap, why he thinks his view of decentralization differs from that of many centralized teams that being such projects, and what the benefits of the SushiSwap vampire mining scheme have been. He discusses: 

  • how and why he got involved in SushiSwap
  • why he feels his view of decentralization differs from that of teams such as Uniswap
  • who he believes the other cofounders are, demographically
  • why cofounder Chef Nomi cashed out to take $13 million after a week’s worth of work on the project 
  • how it was decided to hand the admin key to SushiSwap over to Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX and Alameda Research
  • how SushiSwap proved that liquidity is not a moat, although trading volume might be
  • why he doesn’t own $SUSHI
  • how he feels about taking code from Uniswap
  • the vision for SushiSwap going forward
  • whether or not SushiSwap will be built on another blockchain
  • where he got his $YFI sweatshirt and $YAM pants
  • how SushiSwap introduced a lot of people to being liquidity providers for the first time, and why that’s beneficial for DeFi in general 
  • why, despite Chef Nomi cashing out, he thinks people will still trust anonymous devs going forward

Thank you to our sponsors! 

Crypto.com: http://crypto.com

Nexo: https://www.nexo.io

Cosmos: five.hackatom.org

Episode links: 

0xMaki: https://twitter.com/0xMaki

SushiSwap: https://sushiswapclassic.org

SushiSwap stats: https://sushiswap.vision/home 

The Defiant’s pre-migration recap of the SushiSwap saga: https://thedefiant.substack.com/p/sushiswaps-vampire-scheme-hours-away

How the SushiSwap migration went down: https://www.coindesk.com/sushiswap-migration-defi-protocol-politicians 

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/77324/sushiswap-initiates-migration-of-over-800m-in-liquidity-funds-from-uniswap 

Forbes interview with Sam Bankman-Fried on the SushiSwap drama: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tatianakoffman/2020/09/06/exclusive-sbf-speaks-out-on-defis-sushi-saga/#55e447d65145 

Chef Nomi’s explanation of why he or she decided to cash out: https://twitter.com/NomiChef/status/1302214292792422401?s=20

Reaction to Chef Nomi cashing out: https://twitter.com/alistairmilne/status/1302246157628956672?s=20

Sam Bankman-Fried’s proposal to build out SushiSwap on Solana: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EParJnqmYs1TJ1qX2q8nnyPeKCA1pF10zLCLYoDxTL8/edit

In the end, the total amount of liquidity across both AMMs is greater than before SushiSwap was created: https://twitter.com/koeppelmann/status/1303784413864636417?s=20 

Links from news recap:

https://unchainedpodcast.com/the-key-metric-that-jumped-82-in-august/