Controversial internet personality and self-described misogynist Andrew Tate claims he made $85 million on Binance-supported, so-called decentralized exchange PancakeSwap.

Tate, who currently faces — and denies — charges of rape, sexual assault, and human trafficking in Romania and the UK, didn’t provide any dates, coin prices, or wallet addresses to allow researchers to investigate his claim. This has, understandably led many to doubt that he could have made so much money on such a relatively obscure exchange.

However, as usual, the truth of his claims barely mattered as he quickly parlayed that incredible PancakeSwap claim into a promotional advertisement for his $49/month Discord group. There, he boasted, customers can learn about future pumps and dumps.

They can also apparently pay for more Discord access, including a multi-thousand-dollar upsell payable in chargeback-proof bitcoin.

Yes, Tate has openly advertised early access to pumps and dumps. Throughout his colorful media career, he has promoted many sketchy crypto assets outright.

Read more: Andrew Tate may recover 21 seized bitcoin now worth 88% more

Andrew Tate says meme coins aren’t the crypto meta

In addition to claiming multi-million dollar profits to advertise his paid Discord server, Tate also claimed that the current bull run is not the current bull run.

Despite overwhelming evidence that meme coins are the current meta in crypto and outperforming every other category, Tate disagrees. Instead, he says that meme coins must surrender leadership to “genuinely technological useful or innovating blockchain coins.”

Like it or not, meme coins are definitely the current meta in crypto. Per Google Trends, search interest in meme coins has increased at least 600% in the last month and 50,000% in 12 months. The leading meme coin PEPE has rallied 4 million percent within 12 months. Solana’s blockchain went offline this week because so many users were launching meme coins and larger meme coins like DOGE, SHIB, and FLOKI have more than doubled.

Read more: Tucker Carlson mocks SBF during unhinged Andrew Tate interview

Tate, ignoring this evidence, claims that crypto’s next bull run will be different from the last one, which apparently had DeFi as its trendy meta. He asked his followers to guess at new blockchain innovations.

Even with criminal charges still pending, Tate is still claiming to be a trusted crypto expert. Indeed, not only does he claim to know more than Google about the fastest-growing topic in crypto, he claims that he made $85 million on Binance’s PancakeSwap.

Of course, PancakeSwap’s token is now down 91% from its all-time high. Tate’s trophy DEX has also lost $5.7 billion from its once-$7.8 billion ecosystem.

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The post Andrew Tate brags he made millions on PancakeSwap, disses meme coins appeared first on Protos.

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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The post SBF is a convicted fraudster but is he also SushiSwap’s infamous Chef Nomi? appeared first on Protos.

Wealth equals power, especially when it comes to decentralized exchange (“DEX”) governance, and Uniswap serves as a prime example. 

Unlike a “one person, one vote” democracy, Uniswap’s wealth-based vote weighting system allows the rich to consistently overpower the majority of users.

Due to this plutocratic system, a governance process that’s supposed to be decentralized has become overwhelmingly centralized, and many within Uniswap’s large user base have begun to voice their concern. 

CoinMarketCap ranks Uniswap as the top DEX by volume. Over $1.3 billion worth of transactions have been made on the platform during the past 24 hours.

As opposed to a centralized exchange which requires account creation and Know Your Customer (KYC) checks, anyone can use Uniswap’s protocol to exchange tokens without permission.

Its website and front-end interface, however, is centrally managed and has delisted over 100 tokens during its history without any community vote.

Decentralization theatrics at Uniswap

Most people interact with Uniswap through the website interface. Therefore, the website’s administrator — Uniswap Labs, and its small board of executives — have unilaterally censored the experience of the vast majority of Uniswap users.

According to Uniswap documentation, anyone who holds its proprietary UNI token in a MetaMask wallet and goes through its delegation process can participate in Uniswap’s governance.

However, from a practical standpoint, the financial requirements restrict the majority of users from having any impact on the governance process. The weight of a vote depends on how much UNI the voter has delegated, as delegated tokens determine how many votes the delegate can cast on any given proposal.

For context, one estimate of the amount of UNI needed to actually implement a Uniswap change proposal places the value at around $22 million.

After considering the expenses of UNI staking and ETH fees, some people have questioned whether it’s worth making a proposal at all. As pointed out by one critic, Uniswap’s developers never implemented a fee switch proposal, even though it passed every round of Uniswap’s community voting process, including a consensus check with 100% votes in favor.

Some users countered that Uniswap could be better without implementing the fee switch proposal due to the risks of being classed as a security by the SEC. However, risks aside, the point of interest is that Uniswap’s governance process clearly does not function as advertised.

Resubmitting the proposal may not have helped either. Due to the plutocratic nature of Uniswap’s governance, a wealthy UNI token holder or organization could easily block any resubmission through Uniswap’s weighted voting.

Uniswap delegates are some of the wealthiest organizations in the industry. The a16z delegate, the largest of them all, represents 42 token holders, and has 15,000,039 votes with a total weight of 6.783%. The second largest wallet belongs to ConsenSys, and holds 7,032,461 votes with a vote weight of 3.18%. 

However, this skewed token distribution is not stopping users from trying, and one developer has found a way to submit “autonomous proposals”, therefore bypassing the need to own vast amounts of UNI to create an official vote.

Read more: This Uniswap airdrop promised $2K — instead it stole $8M

Agnihotri’s autonomous proposal aims to enable the controversial “fee switch” which was previously denied by Uniswap. His proposal suggests a 10% protocol fee switch for the following liquidity pools.

• DAI-ETH – 0.05%
• ETH-USDT – 0.3%
• USDC-ETH – 1%

The outcome of the vote is yet to be seen, and although Agnihotri has found a way to autonomously create the proposal, the outcome would still be decided by those who hold the most tokens.

It seems that decentralization, as the SEC has repeatedly reminded, is often in name only.

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The post How Uniswap’s voting system is unfairly favoring the richest token holders appeared first on Protos.