How did you first hear about Sushi?
I first heard about Sushi on Twitter by DegenJulian when he posted the SushiSwap medium article.
After that, what made you transition into wanting to contribute full time?
So, I read the article on Medium by Chef Nomi, and, back then, I was looking to get into DeFi in any way that I could, so I thought this was a perfect opportunity to do just that. My experience till then was that it was quite difficult to actually get hired without much crypto background. I had hopped into the Yearn ecosystem a bit, but I couldn’t see how I was able to help them really, since they had already sort of taken off. So with Sushi, I was able to just come in and help out as a community manager or moderator, and then pretty much started doing business development and overall growing the community by any means. We were able to have the discord explode very quickly and basically like advocate for Sushi policy.
There’s been a lot of debate about which date is the actual Sushi birthday, even as far as some people claiming the vampire attacks should be the birthday date, but when do you think it is?
When Nomi did the first commit, nobody was aware of Sushi yet. I think the first time he really started to speak about it was when he posted the Medium which was around the 26th. Then when it really starting to pick up steam is when the farming opened on the 28th. People were rushing into Sushi, more than we expected.
So for me, I think everyone’s first contact with the protocol was on either the 26th or 28th. But, ultimately the Sushi experience is a kind of “Choose your own adventure.” So, if you want to have it on the day of the vampire attack or the day of the minting of the token, then it’s really up to you!
That’s why I think that the “Sushi Birthday Week” is a pretty good idea.
Some of the Sushi lore is that: “Maki built this all on his own.” How much truth is there in that?
At the very start there was only Nomi, then one or two weeks later the community started getting really involved. Chef Nomi built everything himself from the very beginning, though, like all the contracts and the front end. For me, my role was more into growing the community and the protocol, which involved working to have more eyeballs focused on it.
Then what happened when things got a little bit more difficult, when the rug happened and so on, we were able to have the support of Sam from FTX to help take us through to the next step, which was to transition to migration. We had Boring also helping and a bunch of other people contributors.
So, no, I was never fully by myself in this effort. Maybe with everything related to growth or marketing and so on, you could say that. The governance aspect, such as snapshot, for example, was set up by myself and Boring initially as well, but truly the bulk of the work was done by Chef Nomi early on.
As someone as anonymous as yourself, how were you able to initially reach out to partners, being a representative of an entity with close to zero reputation or credibility.
For that I had to use my previous, now doxed, account. I had been involved in DeFi since 2017, so I did have quite a few contacts and knew a lot of the teams in various different projects, because I was such a power user for some time. So, I used this to reach out to those who I was able to rapidly identify as the most advantageous avenues where Sushi should place its focus. I think like 30 to 40 people know my real identity in the space, but at the end of the day, it was needed for the building blocks of Sushi, so I don’t think it really matters.
So then do you know who Chef Nomi is?
I have no clue who Chef Nomi is. I have ideas, but I don’t know who he is.
Over the past year what would you say were the Top 5 moves Sushi made which created the most impact?
1st. When Sushi opened its farms. I remember this first because it’s actually a year ago today that this launched. As it opened I was watching it grow and very quickly we had over $12 million in the farm, which I felt was a very big amount. Fast forward 2 days and there was almost $1 billion. It was crazy to be a part of.
2nd. When Nomi returned the funds that he rugged, that was a huge event.
3rd. Hiring the first core contributors full time, Jiro and Omakase was a big milestone, pushing Sushi’s growth and development.
4th. Shipping the new Sushi UI earlier this year, along with the Sushi.com domain.
5th. Releasing new products such as Kashi and MISO and soon, Shoyu. This is big because it proves that Sushi is no longer just an AMM anymore.
Bonus: When I, myself, got hired by Sushi. It was around the 1st of September, not exactly right at the start, because I had a day job, but during the early days of September, the community voted to allocate enough money to basically be able to quit my job and dedicate myself full time to the protocol. Since then, I hope that all of our SUSHI holders think this decision paid off.
Leaving your day job was a pretty big risk. Why did you believe so much in Sushi at such an early stage?
For quite some time I was trying to find ways to get into DeFi through a more formal role. I actually really wanted to contribute to Uniswap, but I couldn’t, because my application was never responded to. When SushiSwap was announced I knew this was a do or die moment for me and DeFi and that’s why I was all for it from the get go. One or two people that believed I could really benefit the protocol from contributing full time, gave me $10,000 to basically drop everything I was doing and really go at it for the first month. Back then, this amount was more than half of my yearly salary so it was, to say the least, a considerable amount of money.
What a story! Do you have any sort of theory as to why people are so fiercely loyal to Sushi and why it has such a cult following?
I think it’s because we’re very close to the user base, like I’ve spoken with people that have four digit portfolios up to, you know, guys with over eight, nine figures. And, to me, there’s absolutely no distinction between them. I have waken up to take a call at 4:00 a.m. to help someone in Cameroon, whose life savings was in a Sushi farm, to withdraw. Things like that were always a no-brainer to me. I just had to help them and the Sushi team and community all share in this mindset.
That’s why I think we do have this massive following, because when on Discord you can just pop in and get instant support by reaching someone technical very easily. I had to calm down a little bit on this front myself, because at some point I had absolutely no work life balance and I had to shut down my DMs, otherwise, I was basically always falling behind.
I’m famous for having over 50,000 messages on WeChat, 12,000 on Telegram and over 5,000 on Discord.
I don’t have this massive amount of messages because I just leave them unanswered and I don’t get to them, rather it’s because almost every single day it’s a new back backlog of people reaching out. I’m answering as much as possible while also shipping on the other fronts, you know, in partnership and growth marketing, etc. So I think that’s why Sushi is so popular, it’s just the fact that we’re so accessible.
Handling that amount of pressure it really impressive! How do you do it?
I’ve had to kind of slow down a little bit in the past month or two. I just do 9:00 to 5:00 now, not as much on weekends. I just try to do as much as I can in one day and then I turn off the switch, you know, like otherwise I won’t be there for the next two years. I’ll be burned out.
So it’s very important to have this work life balance, especially in crypto, because it’s so easy to become a workaholic.
I mean I was one! In the very beginning of Sushi, we were talking about 18 hours per day minimum. I would wake up, either at 3 pm or 8pm, depending when my calls were lined up, go directly to my computer and work for 2–3 hours, order about 100 dollars worth of food for the day and not really move from my desk until 5, 6 am before crashing for a nap. I lived like this for literally 7 days a week for 6 months.
Do you agree that Sushi is too spread out and should only focus on the AMM instead of trying to build out this complex ecosystem?
If we have more contributors, we can have more people focus on one area and excel in each of them. I do agree that we are building too much to be supported by only 20 core contributors. I think it’s just a matter of having more Core Developers and Contributors and basically doubling our man power.
Speaking of Twitter, because I know you’re quite active there, in the past 12 months, what were some of the wildest things that you saw, if you can remember?
i. The stopping of MakerDAO
ii. Saving Yam
iii. Sushi DeFi Summer farms
iv. Yearn Launching
v. Uniswap Token Launch
vi. Token airdrops such as Badger DAO, Float Protocol
vii. FEI launch was pretty intense
viii. GameFi taking off, like with Axie Infinity, very few people could have had the insight that this would have taken off, similar to NFTs. Rendering NFT fungible via NFT x vault was one of the major keys in making this NFT season that we’re seeing now. Bringing fungibility to NFTs was a key factor in sweeping floors, arbitraging, etc.
Once Shoyu and Trident are launched do you think that this is the final frontier for Sushi’s ecosystem or would you like to see even more products shipped to expand it even further?
No, no, there’s way more, I think, that we can do. There’s at least two or three protocols that we can work on, and that should, in theory, cover it all. But, yes, I think we still have a little bit of work to do, but after that, it should be fine. What’s missing is, for example, a flywheel, similar to CVX.
Where do you see DeFi heading and how different do you think the landscape will look on Sushi’s 2nd birthday?
I think it will be easier and easier to launch a DAO of any size or any kind. It’s impossible to imagine a future where everything isn’t a DAO, a collective of people that are uniting themselves in even something as harmless as creating a club around one trait of a crypto punk or fans of an instrument. I think it’s very interesting to assume this could happen. I don’t see why my apartment building wouldn’t be a DAO and everything be transparent, where we can see all of the bills coming in and use a multisig to take care of those. This is the future I want to live in, personally.
I think high transaction fees are probably going to be a thing of the past, which is going to be enabling new primitives that were too expensive for mainnet. I’m thinking that we’re going to see our new AMM, Trident, being used in novel ways and becoming more of a managed financial product, like putting vaults for LPs.
Time to take some questions from the community via Twitter!
For me personally, would be to have on-chain governance enabled in the next 12 months. For Sushi, would be to make sure we are generating the same amount of revenue without any inflation or incentives and be sustainable without it.
I like Pplpleaser, of course.
Gary Cartilage: https://opensea.io/collection/gary-cartlidge
Kinetoscope: https://opensea.io/collection/kinetoscope
What are your hobbies outside of Sushi?
I love squash, hiking, vinyl. I like to read and I like PENS! These days I’ve been spending a lot of time exploring the metaverse and different VR platforms, like Neos.
Do you have a favourite anime?
My first one was Dragon Ball. Some of my favourites are Naruto, Hunter x Hunter, Shaman King, Dragon Quest and one of the newer favourites is: That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.
For the big Sushi contributor meetup, where would you want to go if you could choose anywhere in the world?
I would say that every Sushi team member needs to see Japan.
What’s your favourite sushi?
I actually have a list of favourites.
Shima Aji
Kanpachi
Sumi Ika
Botan Ebi
Hon maguro kama-toro
Hon maguro senaka akami
Hon maguro no Chutoro
King Salmon
Aburi King Salmon
Hokkaido Uni
Unagi or Anago
Negitoro Temaki
Tamago
And I’m thinking of minting my first NFT and the highest bidder will be the only person to know what my favourite sushi restaurant is. So look out for that contest coming soon.
Keep on the lookout for more weekly Sushi core team interviews!
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