SushiSwap has been whipsawed by busted deals and the departures of key leaders. And yet the decentralized exchange remains one of DeFi’s second-largest DEX by trading volume and now, a coalition of of other projects is rallying to get behind it.
A Snapshot proposal, based on a post from Sushi’s forums, is imminent, according to its author, Justin Bram of Ondo Finance, a protocol that bills itself as a decentralized investment bank. Ondo’s co-founder Nathan Allman authored the proposed changes. The proposal calls for another group of projects putting their collective weight behind Sushi to turn the project into a multi-chain DeFi force.
The proposal, called Poke Bowl, would formalize Sushi as an on-chain DAO, which means voting will trigger smart contracts to execute and establish a legal entity for the project. The move would take assets like the protocol’s Twitter and Discord accounts off-chain. Both entities would be governed by SUSHI holders, according to the forum post, which preceded the Snapshot proposal.
Salvage Sushi
“Something needs to be done to salvage sushi before it’s too late,” tweeted Michael Dempsey, general partner, at Compound, an investment firm, in response to Ondo’s proposal. “As long as team hierarchy is solved with clear leadership, I think this is a great proposal that aligns with where in the ecosystem Sushi fits, as a core piece of multichain DeFi infrastructure.”
There may be emotional motivation behind the proposal too: “I think we all have a soft spot for Sushi,” Bram told The Defiant.
Sushiswap’s Snapshot has more than 22,000 members, good for the fourth most and ahead of behemoths like UniSwap and OlympusDAO.
“We all have a soft spot for Sushi.”
Justin Bram
Sushi has had its fair share of chaos in the last six months. 0xMaki, the protocol’s co-founder, stepped down in September to take on an advisory role. Joseph Delong, Sushi’s former CTO, left the DAO amidst swirling controversy regarding the protocol’s direction.
Just weeks ago, a solution appeared to be at hand: Frog Nation, a collective of protocols headed up by Daniele Sesta, was primed to form a deep partnership with Sushi. The plan was for Sesta and his crew to create an ecosystem that included Sushi, the now-beleaguered Wonderland, Abracadabra and other projects which make up Frog Nation.
After a failed merger with Frog Nation, signs of trouble have continued to kick out from Sushi. Most recently, governance has had to vote to get back admin control of the project’s Discord, which Delong had control of.
Ondo Integration
Now Ondo has kicked off their own efforts to support the protocol with the decentralized investment bank aiming to leverage its own specialities which include a product which breaks Sushi liquidity provider (LP) positions into different tranches of risk and return. If this service is adopted by Sushi, more investors may be attracted to increased customizability of the decentralized exchange’s options.
Ondo will also tokenize those tranches, meaning that users will be able to trade those tranched positions on Sushi, as well as borrow against them on Kashi, Sushi’s lending product.
Under the proposal, Sushi would also integrate Ondo’s liquidity as a service (LaaS) product into its interface. Ondo essentially matches stablecoin providers like Fei Protocol which provide their stablecoin with other projects which provide the native token. The stablecoin providers get a consistent 5% return on their tokens, while the partner projects get liquidity on their token without needing to provide liquidity mining incentives.
Bram sees this service being integrated with Sushi’s frontend.
