No.196
SushiSwap SUSHI
the copy that ate the original, then opened branches everywhere
π a ninja chef who borrowed a rival's recipe and handed out free samples until the whole street walked over
π¬ βI started as someone else's recipe. In September 2020 I set out free samples on the corner, and by the weekend the whole crowd had carried their tables over to me. Now I serve the same dish on dozens of streets at once.β
- What: a decentralized exchange where you swap tokens through code, not a company.
- Born: August 2020, by copying Uniswap's code and adding a reward token, SUSHI.
- Famous move: the βvampire attackβ pulled roughly $840M of rival liquidity across in one weekend.
- Supply: no Bitcoin-style cap, new SUSHI is minted as rewards and emissions can be changed by a vote.
π The Story
August 28, 2020. An anonymous developer calling himself Chef Nomi took the open code behind Uniswap, the most popular token-swapping app on Ethereum, and shipped a near-identical copy named SushiSwap. Copying was allowed, the code was public. The twist was the seasoning: a new token, SUSHI, that paid people for using the kitchen.
Early September 2020. Then came the move that made its name. SushiSwap offered SUSHI rewards to anyone who unplugged their deposits from Uniswap and plugged them into SushiSwap instead. So many people did that around $840 million of liquidity walked across in a single weekend. People nicknamed it the βvampire attackβ: the clone drinking the lifeblood of the original it was copied from.
September 5, 2020. The chaos turned real. Chef Nomi suddenly sold the project's development fund, about $14 million worth of SUSHI, and the price crashed roughly 73%. Furious holders called it a rug-pull. Six days later, on September 11, he returned every cent and apologized. Control of the project was handed to Sam Bankman-Fried, then the CEO of the FTX exchange, before the community eventually took the keys.
It is a strange origin for something that lasted. Born from a copy, nearly killed by its own creator in its first week, SushiSwap survived and grew into a swap hub running across dozens of blockchains.
π Stats
𧩠How it works
SushiSwap has no company and no order book. It is a set of smart contracts that run an automated market maker (AMM). Some users deposit a pair of tokens into a shared pot, called a liquidity pool. Everyone else swaps against that pot, and a simple formula sets the price from the ratio of what's inside. The people who fill the pot earn a slice of every fee.
π Light & Shadow
- Trades run on public code, so you keep your own tokens and never hand them to a company that could freeze or lose them
- The SUSHI token shares fees and votes with users, which turned a rented kitchen into a community-owned one
- Spread across 35+ blockchains, so it isn't tied to a single network's traffic or fees
- The week-one near rug-pull and the leadership handed to FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried left a lasting trust scar
- No supply cap. New SUSHI is minted as rewards forever, so the token can be diluted over time (Bitcoin freezes at 21 million; SUSHI keeps issuing)
- It is a copy by design, with little technical edge over Uniswap, the rival it forked and still competes against for the same users
𧬠Evolution lineage
SushiSwap is a fork of Uniswap. It copied Uniswap's v2 AMM code in August 2020, then diverged by adding the SUSHI governance token and fee-sharing for liquidity providers, and launched itself with a βvampire attackβ on its own parent.
π§ Meet other friends
β FAQ
- What is SushiSwap?
- A decentralized exchange (DEX) where you swap one token for another straight through smart contracts, with no company or order book in the middle. Instead of matching buyers and sellers, it prices trades against shared pools of tokens that users fill themselves.
- What was the SushiSwap βvampire attackβ?
- SushiSwap is a copy of Uniswap's code, so in September 2020 it offered SUSHI rewards to anyone who moved their Uniswap deposits over. Around $840M of liquidity migrated across in a single weekend. The clone drained the original it was built from.
- What is the SUSHI token for?
- SUSHI is a governance token: holding it lets you vote on protocol decisions. If you stake it (as xSUSHI), you also earn a share of the trading fees the exchange collects. New SUSHI is minted as a reward for the people who supply liquidity.
- Does SUSHI have a supply cap like Bitcoin?
- No. CoinGecko lists its max supply as unlimited, and fresh SUSHI keeps being minted as rewards. An early 2020 vote talked about settling near 250 million coins, but supply has already passed that and no hard cap is locked in on-chain.
β οΈ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only