SUSHI

What is SushiSwap (SUSHI)?

SushiSwap, or “Sushi” as the protocol is being rebranded, is a platform that brings together a range of decentralized markets and instruments.

It is a community-governed, decentralized ecosystem that includes suitably sushi-themed products such as decentralized exchange and lending, yield instruments, an auction platform, and an AMM framework.

Sushi is one of the industry’s most storied decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, and despite its fall from one-time heights, it remains synonymous with all things DeFi.

SushiSwap is a fork of DeFi giant Uniswap, which before SushiSwap’s launch, was the dominant platform in the sphere of decentralized exchanges. At the time, Uniswap gave liquidity providers a share of trading fees but hadn’t yet launched its native UNI token.

When was SushiSwap Launched?

In August 2020, a pseudonymous group led by “Chef Nomi” forked Uniswap, creating the SushiSwap platform. While the theme taken from a popular form of cuisine was a fun gimmick, SushiSwap also included a more tangible set of benefits. Chief among these was the SUSHI token, which allowed providers to keep earning fees even if they stopped providing liquidity.

This offered Uniswap liquidity providers a chance to bring their LP tokens across to SushiSwap and take advantage of a serious early adopter advantage.

The plan worked, for in a matter of days, SushiSwap had managed to accumulate a staggering $1.2 billion in liquidity.

However, the controversy was to strike almost immediately, as Sushi founder Chef Nomi sold $8 million worth of SUSHI tokens in the first week of September 2020. Then, amid outrage and the value of SUSHI tanking, Chef Nomi handed their admin keys for the project over to then-FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.

A little more than two years later, Bankman-Fried finds himself in remand custody in the infamous Fox Hill prison in Nassau, facing eight counts from US federal prosecutors. In early September 2020, though, the former Wall Street trader, once fondly known as “SBF,” deployed a multisig to the project’s smart contracts to hand control to the community. Days later, Chef Nomi issued a public apology and said that they had returned $14 million in ETH to the project treasury.

In a vicious twist of fate, Uniswap was to have its revenge. With the issuance of its own UNI token on the 17th of September, the “OG” platform created a rush of traders back onto its own platform, literally bringing Ethereum to a standstill in the process.

How Does SushiSwap Work?

SushiSwap is a decentralized application (dApp) deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. As such, it’s simply a set of smart contracts woven together, similarly to Uniswap.

At its heart, Sushi is a decentralized exchange, allowing users to trade between different crypto assets. It began with three different trading pairs but has expanded significantly since.

Rather than use a traditional orderbook, Sushi uses an automated market maker (AMM) protocol to allow trading. AMMs rely on users of the platform to provide liquidity via pools for other users to trade against.

Traders have to pay a fee, which is then given to the users that provide cryptocurrencies to the liquidity pools. These liquidity providers are also rewarded with SUSHI tokens, one of the main things that led to SushiSwap’s frenetic and hugely successful launch period.

What Makes SushiSwap Unique?

Sushi also offers various additional features rather than sticking to the basics of DEX operation, making it unique and differentiating it from the likes of Uniswap. These include:

• Trident. A framework for building and deploying AMMs that can be openly expanded upon and integrate future AMMs that may be competitive.
• Onsen. For yield farming on Sushi, and a way to automatically incentivize the provision of liquidity for newer tokens.
• xSUSHI. A reward token for staking SUSHI in the SushiBar. These xSUSHI tokens accrue value from platform fees.
• BentoBox. A token vault that generates yield by tracking a user’s deposits via artificial balance. Essentially utilizing idle funds, BentoBox uses relatively low-risk yield farming strategies.
• Kashi Lending. A lending and margin trading platform built on BentoBox.

Sushi even allows traders to use limit orders, which is quite standard for order book exchanges and difficult to accomplish within an AMM.

How is the SushiSwap Network Secured?

Sushi is a dApp on the Ethereum blockchain, and SUSHI is an ERC-20 token, so the project relies on Ethereum for security and consensus.

Luckily, Ethereum is one of the most secure and decentralized blockchains in the industry. Blocks on Ethereum are produced and validated by nodes called validators. These nodes, or rather their operators, have to bond a minimum of 32 ETH to the protocol.

Many validators opt to stake far more ETH than this already significant minimum since the size of a validator’s stake is directly proportional to their chance of proposing a block. However, when they do get selected as block proposers, they earn a block reward in ETH.

While this mechanism is a significant incentive to perform well, there’s also slashing to consider. This is a means of penalizing a validator by confiscating their bonded ETH if they misbehave and fail to fulfill the protocol’s requirements.

Between block rewards and slashing, Ethereum’s many validators are very well incentivized to behave according to the protocol. As established and decentralized as Ethereum is, attacking it would be no mean feat.

It must be noted that while Ethereum itself is very secure, plenty of dApps on Ethereum have been exploited or compromised. This is because their smart contracts have allowed for various attacks or contained loopholes. Sushi’s smart contracts can be viewed and audited via the project’s GitHub repository.

What is the Use of SUSHI?

SUSHI is the native token of the Sushi platform, and its primary use is in DeFi activities on Sushi and rewarding users a portion of platform fees. SUSHI tokens also give users a say in the platform’s future via decentralized governance.

Who Controls SushiSwap?

SushiSwap is controlled by holders of SUSHI tokens. Governance is decentralized and carried out via proposals and voting.

However, smaller changes affecting operations and changes to the SushiSwap menu farming parts are decided on by the core team.

How Much SUSHI Is In Circulation?

The SUSHI token has a maximum supply of 250 million, with over 222 million SUSHI currently in circulation. Unlike many other cryptocurrencies, SUSHI did not have a pre-mine, nor was it sold to investors before the public had access to it.

Instead, SUSHI is released at a fixed number of tokens per Ethereum block. However, this issuance was elevated during the first 100,000 blocks of the platform’s existence, with 1000 SUSHI issued per block at that time.

How Do You Buy SUSHI?

There is no better place to buy SUSHI than from the Sushi platform itself. It’s a decentralized, permissionless dApp, so all you’ll need to get started is an Ethereum wallet loaded with some ETH for gas.

Furthermore, the Sushi platform allows you to stake SUSHI for reward-bearing xSUSHI, so much of the best utility for the token is found on its native platform.

You can also pick up SUSHI tokens on most major Ethereum-based DEXs, including major competitors like Ethereum. It’s also possible to buy SUSHI on centralized exchanges, including most, if not all, of the top-tier platforms.

SUSHI’s ample CEX listings were a source of controversy when Chef Nomi sold off their SUSHI tokens since it was a new project at the time and very unaudited. What it did have were hype and popularity, and CEXs were roundly criticized for rushing to list SUSHI to serve demand without doing the required due diligence.

How Do You Store SUSHI?

SUSHI is best stored in an Ethereum-compatible wallet. Most reputable hot wallets, like Metamask and Trust Wallet, allow you to easily interact with the Sushi platform and partake in DeFi using your SUSHI tokens.

You can also store SUSHI in various cold wallets, but it may not be quite as easy to connect to Sushi with one of these.

Is SUSHI a Good Investment?

It’s difficult to talk about DeFi without mentioning SushiSwap, and it’s a protocol that has contributed significantly to the industry as a whole.

However, as its launch showed, traders are often a fickle bunch, rushing headlong for a better source of yield whenever one becomes available. This highlights Sushi’s need to innovate to stay relevant, and its ever-growing product portfolio suggests an attempt to do exactly that.

As SushiSwap itself showed with its Uniswap fork, DeFi is lucrative, and competitors can appear out of nowhere. While other platforms seem to have overtaken it in one way or another, it may yet be too soon to suggest that the trading community has lost its appetite for Sushi.