It’s just over a week old and SushiSwap is still getting the headlines. This is a summary of my personal journey on what happened and where to go next.
Frustation and Apologies
I definitely found myself overtired and frustrated so apologies to anyone on the end of that. I could see this potentiality coming and wanted to prevent it. That we failed to get a handover complete before chef could do what he did was a point of annoyance, compounded by people twisting themselves into all manner of contrivances to accept it. In the end I withdrew from the Discord to get some break time. Lack of sleep is not conducive to objective thought.
Not enough people took the threat seriously and there are too many people in high positions, and in the community, who want to whitewash it rather than deal with it head on.
It’s ironic that a supposedly community owned DEX has quite the number of CEX people involved in the foreground or background, only one of which, to my knowledge and all be it at my prompting, has been vocal about the return of at least some funds. Sam at Alameda, whatever your views and even if just for optics, at least did that.
Vampires
I have never agreed with criticisms of the vampire mining business model. Customers are not your property and neither is your open sourced code. You don’t have to like it but SushiSwap’s concept was both simple and clever. It has shown what happens when people really do own their own property so we’d better all get used to it.
UniSwap and Hayden
How the vampire entity handles itself and chooses to reward the originator, development communities, or anyone else does matter though. If the originator is awarding themselves millions of dollars after a few days, being triumphant about it whilst giving no credit or pay to their coworkers or those responsible for the original code, they should be heavily criticised so we can incentive better behaviour and improve customer (LPs, whoever) expectations. Not enough of that has happened because people just care about the price, not the defi ecosystem.
MultiSig Signers
Several people have suggested me as a multisig signer but I’ve repeatedly told people in public and private that I cannot do that unless it was a literal emergency. As a position of ultimate power, in my opinion a signer must:
- Not express keen opinions on the direction or actions of the organisation.
- Not have clear conflicts of interest, e.g. work at an exchange, fund, and so on.
- Be level headed about all actions involving the organisation and signing.
- Accept there is legal risk.
- Not seem to be wanting a position of power.
Suffice to say, if I wanted to be a signer I would not be saying a lot of the things I have. Freedom to express an opinion is something I value above all else and I need to be able to call out bad behaviour when many others won’t.
Who is Chef?
To the best of my knowledge, there is no firm evidence of the culprit despite increasing circumstantial evidence. They’ve been named, as has their company, and I found the company & personal denials rang a little hollow and were curiously late. If it isn’t this person then it does indicate it maybe someone in their vicinity.
However, without firm evidence everyone must consider it may not be them. Doxxing the wrong party is not a great look. It’s also unclear to me if they broke the law, that’s for lawyers to decide should chef’s identity be proven. IANAL.
What Next?
The project will be handed over to the community very shortly and they will decide, at least technically handed over. After that, we shall see!
