Recently, the SushiSwap community voted on a proposal that signaled support for transferring nearly the entirety of the treasury from the DAO to a ‘Labs’ entity. Sushigov.eth, the operational multisig for SushiSwap, voted for the first time in a governance proposal, voting ‘Yay’ with 5.5 million SUSHIPOWER, the largest individual voter, and approximately 30% of the votes in favor. 

Recently, sushigov.eth received significant quantities of Sushi, including approximately 1.9 million on April 4, from 0x4bb4c1B0745ef7B4642fEECcd0740deC417ca0a0, an address that resolves to *.eth. It also received an additional 1.78 million Sushi on April 3, as well as two additional deposits of 1.9 million and 1.8 million from that same address. 

This signal vote passed by a margin of approximately 8 million votes.

Sushi’s restructuring

This is the latest step in what’s become a years-long effort for the oft-controversial Sushi organization to restructure itself. Since then, Sushi has deleted or privated discussion of these changes on its governance forum. 

In 2022, the Sushi community voted to begin restructuring and, as part of this process, received advice from law firm Fenwick & West. 

The following year, Sushi launched a new proposal noting that it intended to switch its legal advice from Fenwick & West to Gresham International. The forum discussion of this change is also no longer available at the address in the proposal but a review of archives and an address shared by Jared Grey, the ‘Head Chef’ of Sushi, reveals a community note in which a user claims that they have “been in the legal industry most of my career and I’ve never heard of Gresham. So I’m not sure they are a leading international firm.”

Jared Grey, Sushi’s ‘head chef,’ defended the decision by noting that Gresham International “worked with many projects in the space” and further added that Fenwick’s proposal “wasn’t sufficient to meet the needs of the DAO.” 

Gresham International’s website does note several projects it has worked for in the space, including RadioShack, as well as less well-known firms like CryptoCammel mining, ArabChain, Quantum Kingdom of Zululand, and AFCash a token issued by Africunia Bank (note: this does not seem to be a bank).

Read more: SushiSwap team wants to kill DAO to benefit themselves

Protos had asked whether or not Gresham International had advised Sushi on the recent movement of assets from the DAO to the new Labs entities, to which Evans responded, “We cannot comment on any work that we undertake for clients as a matter of privacy.”

Gresham International’s Gitbook notes that a project it previously worked with, Aubit, had significant problems, including “criminal activities.” However, it also noted that Aubit “switched to their own in-house team and the use of other third party counsel for some years since our engagement.”

This is followed by another post related to a lawsuit that named Gresham. The firm noted, “As Gresham US is a company that has worked with Wyoming and its legislature, we are aware that Wyoming is forward thinking and we consider the state to be a friend of Gresham International. We have no doubt that a Jury and Judge will see this lawsuit for what it is and who the parties involved are.”

Currently, the implementation vote to continue the movement of assets from the DAO to the Labs entity currently has approximately 99% ‘Yay’ votes, including, of course, sushigov.eth. 

Update 2024-04-24 16:47 UTC: Removed discussion of Gresham International’s awards after Gresham International was able to provide documentation for the awards.

Update 2024-04-24 14:38 UTC: Added note from Jared Grey about discussion of law firm.

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The post Sushi’s long restructuring continues to struggle appeared first on Protos.

A new governance proposal for SushiSwap proposes moving the assets from the ‘DAO’ controlled treasury to a new ‘Sushi Labs’ and will make sure that all future airdrops are directed to the ‘Labs’ instead of the ‘DAO.’

The funds the proposal would transfer to the new entities are effectively the entire treasury for the project. However, the proposal also seems to include assets that aren’t included in the ‘Treasury’ wallet listed on the governance page for SushiSwap. Indeed, the proposal lists both 168 ether and 1,228 ether, but the wallet in question only seems to contain 168. Additionally, it doesn’t seem to contain any of the Dai or WBTC mentioned in the proposal. 

Jared Grey, the ‘Head Chef’ of Sushi reached out to Protos to claim that the additional assets are located in an “operations wallet since before my time as Head Chef. FYI, the operations multisig is publicly well-known and readily available for review.” This “operations wallet” is still not listed on the ‘Treasury’ page on the Snapshot DAO governance platform for Sushi.

Furthermore, this proposal intends to “empower Sushi Labs with exhaustive and sole operational responsibility for core product development.”

This comes a little over a month after Naïm Boubziz, formerly associated with SushiSwap, took to X to highlight that the governance forum for SushiSwap had been deleted. Grey claims that this forum had not been deleted but instead claims Sushi “migrated forum software providers to reduce user spam, and some historical links do not auto-redirect to the new archive.” Grey provided a link to the discussion in question, which interestingly, had never before been archived on Wayback Machine or Archive Today.

This was followed by a change to the DAO, which made it so only core team members could create new proposals. Grey claimed in an email to Protos that this “has been the DAO precedent for years; the core team has not recently changed it.” However, the page linked by Grey does not claim that only Core team members can submit proposals, it states that “only proposals posted to the Snapshot voting system by the CORE can be considered binding if passed with a quorum.”

This change apparently included removing snapshot votes, which were challenging the treasury management of the Sushi team.

More recently, Boubziz took to X to criticize the new proposal, claiming that it was intended to “kill the DAO.” 

Read more: MakerDAO could back a billion Dai with Ethena’s ‘synthetic dollar’ USDe

The signal vote on this proposal currently has approximately 93% of participants voting ‘Nay.’ The vote will run until April 9. Despite the large proportion of votes against this idea, there is also a snapshot pending that covers the ‘implementation’ of this proposal, scheduled to begin voting on April 9.

Update 2024-06-10 14:24: Added comments from Jared Grey of Sushi.

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Seasoned crypto users will recognize SushiSwap as one of the earliest DEXs. Indeed, many of the earliest forks of Uniswap used food-based naming schemes, including HoneySwap, BakerySwap, MojitoSwap, BurgerSwap, CandySwap, KibbleSwap, MilkySwap, IceCreamSwap, WinerySwap, OreoSwap, and ChickenSwap.

Unsurprisingly, few of these food-themed exchanges continue operating with any meaningful volume today. But Chef Nomi’s SushiSwap and Binance’s PancakeSwap are still up and running.

Although not quite as prominent as it once was, most people operating in crypto today will know about SushiSwap. After all, it was one of the largest forks of Uniswap. And while Hayden Adams, who long reigned as the most successful DEX founder at Uniswap, attracted criticism for his decentralization theatrics and loyalty to venture capitalists, SushiSwap attracted followers who wanted something better.

When Uniswap ignored the outcome of a governance vote by its own token holders, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Chef Nomi, the aptly named leader of SushiSwap, started broadcasting on social media. He (most people assumed the pseudonymous leader was male) boasted about how SUSHI token holders would always be prioritized, unlike Uniswap’s sporadic disregard of UNI.

Then Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) began tweeting about SushiSwap. The powerful billionaire’s tweets became more frequent, and his support became undeniable. Indeed, SBF tweeted about the project at least 150 times.

During the summer of 2020, Chef Nomi personally dumped $13 million in SUSHI or its ETH backing. Initially, he denied it but eventually admitted to the rug pull after SUSHI’s price catastrophically collapsed from above $8 to pennies.

Most of SBF’s tweets were created in late 2020 as SUSHI was collapsing. He applauded the community rebuilding after Chef Nomi’s rug pull and claimed that SushiSwap was giving participants superior payouts. He also praised SUSHI’s price recovery and even into July 2021, brazenly broadcast that the SUSHI token was undervalued.

Consequently, many people viewed SBF as the white knight who could save the beleaguered exchange, and that dream became a reality when Chef Nomi admitted to granting control of the exchange to SBF.

Read more: Takeovers, trading, and tokens: SBF’s crypto empire unraveled

Chef Nomi tried to explain the situation in a Twitter thread. In the thread, he seemed annoyed that people thought he conducted an exit scam or didn’t deserve the ETH. He said he moved any remaining “devshares” — a euphemism for assets that he once believed were rightfully his — to a multisig wallet.

However, some people wondered if Chef Nomi was actually SBF all along.

A federal jury found SBF guilty — but was he Chef Nomi?

Chef Nomi apologized for the chaos caused by his SushiSwap liquidations. He eventually repented, giving back $14 million in ETH to SushiSwap’s treasury and proving it with a transaction hash. A few weeks later, he disappeared from Twitter forever.

Since his departure, many people have speculated about Chef Nomi’s identity. Around the time that FTX and Alameda Research began to crater, Up Only podcaster Cobie mentioned that Nomi had a writing style similar to SBF. For months, Cobie pinned a tweet to the top of his Twitter profile speculating that SBF was Chef Nomi.

Cobie thought it noteworthy that Chef Nomi went out of his way to thank SBF for helping to bail SushiSwap out. When Chef Nomi ultimately transferred control of SushiSwap to SBF, Cobie took a victory lap of sorts.

In the years before the FTX meltdown, SBF had been positioning himself as the poster boy of the digital asset industry. He talked endlessly about ‘effective altruism’ and efforts to bail out struggling digital asset companies. Could he have engineered the SushiSwap near-disaster to look like a hero? Or, as some speculated, was he just looking for additional liquidity for Solana and saw a convenient DEX in SushiSwap?

SBF, of course, might have had something to say about that. He’d previously posted harsh words about Chef Nomi, saying that SushiSwap clearly had no future for as long as Chef Nomi controlled it.

Read more: Crypto traders unleash dangerous AI trading bots on DEXs

In the end, the Chef Nomi rug pull-and-refund incident became one of the most famous true tales of crypto. Some people even use ‘Chef Nomi’ as a verb to describe misbehavior at obvious clones of other protocols whose founders intend to rug pull.

What has happened with SushiSwap since then?

Today, the SUSHI token trades around $1.25, considerably down from its all-time high of $23.38. The original SushiSwap on Ethereum still gets a seven-figure daily trading volume, though CoinMarketCap warns that its code contains a vulnerability in its RouteProcessor2 contract and users should revoke all approvals. As of April 2023, current SushiSwap ‘head chef’ Jared Grey said developers were working on fixing that problem.

SushiSwap also launched a perpetual futures exchange in February 2024 and hosted some side events at the latest Ethereum Denver event. In addition, it added ZetaChain to the list of blockchains that host the decentralized exchange. It also managed to reboot its staking rewards, which it refers to as the ‘Sushi Bar,’ as well as the Sushi Academy.

Chef Nomi apparently vanished after causing a fiasco by selling his SUSH holdings. Of course, there was speculation over who this pseudonymous founder of SushiSwap could have been. Maybe it was a cover identity for SBF; maybe it wasn’t.

To this day, the identity of Chef Nomi remains an unsolved mystery.

His project, SushiSwap, lives on as a mid-tier exchange that can still, indeed, facilitate the exchange of tokens across several blockchains.

However, its once-white knight and now-criminal savior SBF — to whom Chef Nomi granted control of SushiSwap in late 2020 — will be heading to prison soon for unrelated crimes. With substantially all of SBF’s trial appearances complete, the world might never know whether he was Chef Nomi after all.

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