EP.11 [EN] 0xMaki - Sushiswap's Glory Road / 寿司的光荣之路
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Mabel Jiang, the host of 51%, a podcast series presented by Multicoin Capital. This show is the exploration of blockchain's rapid development across Asia, with a particular focus on the perspectives, communities, and operators based in China. My goal is to bring Eastern perspective to West and Western perspective to East, so you can better understand the crypto's unique market structure and how these distinct communities think and operate.

This podcast will feature a mix of English and Chinese discussions. The language you're hearing now will be the language I use for the rest of the podcast. Stay up to date with my latest episode by subscribing to this podcast. Thank you for listening.

Thank you.

Hello everyone, welcome back to 51%. This is your host, Mabo Jang. So today I'm super excited to have 0xMaki from SushiSwap to join us. Maki, do you want to say hello to everyone? Hello everyone, this is 0xMaki, happy to be here today.

SushiSwap started as a fork of Uniswap at the end of August 2020. Yet today it grew into an empire of AMM where the contributors of SushiSwap added a bunch of supporting features and protocols into this multifunctional AMM suite. So today, in light of the launching event of BentoBox, which is one of the additional features that you guys are adding, I'm thrilled to have this conversation with you. Thank you, Maki.

So to start this conversation, I would love to hear you give a bit of an intro about yourself and how did you end up being part of the three-year journal creator of SushiSwap. Thank you for having me. So very quickly, I started being involved in crypto around...

2013, once the Winklevoss actually did a very sizable purchase of Bitcoin, kind of got into it a little bit. I received my first crypto in 2013 with Stellar, then kind of got involved a little bit in Dogecoin when it was launched. They didn't really do anything in particular, just, you know, was there for the community.

I lost touch with the ecosystem and everything surrounding it for, I don't know, two or three years. Came back later on, was playing a little bit with, you know, centralized exchange, but nothing of substance really.

That is until 2017 when I kind of started to hear some things on AcroNews about the DAO Act, which I was not really aware of. That was the first interaction I had with the Ethereum ecosystem, which is great.

I guess what picked my curiosity. And from there, you know, I've seen all of the ICOs, 2017 Mania and so on and so on. I couldn't be more happy to be part of this ecosystem. I think I've never really made any waves before. And so I was just more like a,

looking, getting interested, but never took action to be part of the community, mostly because I didn't think I had any of the, I would say, skills or experience needed to really thrive in the Ethereum community.

which seems very odd to say now that SushiSwap is becoming this huge project on not just Ethereum but Polkadot and even Serum, Serana. So yeah, that's kind of, I guess, my intro to the crypto community. How did you end up being part of the general creator of SushiSwap?

So I first got introduced to SushiSwap via Twitter where, you know, I joined like, I just saw a random medium article, which are nowadays similar to white paper back then during the ICO phase. I was able to scan very quickly and, you know, was sold by the idea of, you know, a community led Uniswap because I saw some of the pitfalls in the, you know,

the product because I've been involved since, I don't know, very early 2019 in Uniswap being, you know, in their Slack, uh, been using the product in itself. Um, but you know, it, it was very hard for someone to get, um, for example, like get a token listed in the,

in the dropdown, even though that sounds silly nowadays because we have token list that is out. Back then that was our hurdle. Many other things, you know, like very interesting UIs were not, I guess, seeing any sort of recognition or spotlight. That was kind of frustrating from a user point of view because you had to, you know, find these new UIs and use them because of, for example, one had limit orders, another one had, you know,

One inch. So one inch started as an outlier UI of Uniswap too.

and so on and so on. So that's why I felt that, you know, a community-led AMM was needed. And yeah, it just took action. Joined the Discord, we were nine people in there and I started to engage with back then Chef Nobu. That's interesting. And coming back to the story of how originally Sushi was created, later on you also kind of just like took over the...

the leadership of SushiSwap. I was wondering how were you thinking, like what were you thinking at that time to really kind of turn this from a hobby into a full-time job?

What was your thought there? I think I've always been waiting to be involved in the space. So that was not like really anything other than a calling. I just felt this was time to drop everything that I could and commit myself full time because I don't see it as a work or a job. I just see it as the natural path and where I can have the most impact, I think, in the industry.

Somehow, you know, I've been putting 70, 80, 90 hours per week in the project since August, and I don't feel any pain or tiredness. It's fun. I have, like, a lot of... How can you say, like...

motivation to make this happen and to make sure that everyone is enjoying like the best experience possible. And I think that by pushing so hard, we're also kind of making things change around the ecosystem. We can give back also to communities, bridge them. The next step is obviously to incentivize more developers and community members, even if they're not technical.

And yeah, that's kind of why I'm, I guess, so driven by this project. It's not a job at all. It's fun stuff. Yeah, it's definitely becoming a lifestyle of your own. A lot of these people who are part of this process, not even just within SushiSwap, but generally evolve and develop.

the DeFi space, like they already kind of took this as part of their lifestyle instead of like a fine line between the career versus life. Yeah, so this is definitely exciting. You recently published a post about the 2021 roadmap. I think that's something I would really love to unpack here. So you certainly have a lot to offer

Some products are like the long discussed topics on Twitter, like BentoBox or Miso, which stands for mini initial sushi offering. And then some are the newer initiatives, such as like Mirin,

initiative proposed by LoveX about improving sushi's liquidity many times by the idea of franchise pools. I would like to dive deeper into this discussion of the 2021 roadmap. So before we talk about things that are coming up, let's start with something that's already out there.

So you launch Onsen, I think it was probably a month ago-ish. That's a rotational reward program that incentivizes new liquidity provider and then allows people to vote for new pools. So I think there's a great way to incentivize the mid-cap and small cap liquidity provision.

So how did Onsen go? So what is very interesting about the Onsen is we want to make sure smart cap gems and you know mid cap projects can have some sort of spotlight with sustainable yields. Why I think this is very important and key in the community building of SushiSwap is that not only are we incentivizing, we're also making sure that you know

more people get access to sushi and we bridge these communities. So some of these projects are actually doing MAA with, you know, people from the sushi community. And then we can have like more partnerships, synergies. And I think the benefit, the benefits is not just about TVL or volume. I think it's mostly about, you know,

making everyone grow at the same time bigger and stronger because this is one, this is very key, I think, in the ecosystem and in DeFi. Someone cannot keep up with everything that is happening on the daily. And this is, we make sure that, you know, the people are,

that are applying to the on-site are a minimum, you know, there's some due diligence a little bit to make sure that there is no rug pull making it into it and make sure to vet the team to make sure it is safe for people providing liquidity. Even though like, you know, issues can happen, exploit can happen. Nothing is 100% safe in DeFi.

But yeah, so far, I think the benefits of the onsen have been tremendous for some projects. Some were, you know, 1 million, 2 million market cap, and they had 500,000 USD worth of liquidity in their pools, which is crazy when you think about this. Because once a project is more liquid, it means more people can have access to it.

So, yeah, so far, so good. I mean, we want to still expand the on-site and we want to make it sustainable. It's not just about like a very high APY, like quick quote unquote money for the LPs. It's also to make sure that some project get the attention they deserve.

I do like the idea of serving the underserved, whether that being some of the users of SushiSwap or the smaller cap, mid-cap projects. So I think this is definitely a much needed initiative. So good to hear about that.

So now let's talk a little bit more about this upcoming BentoBox. So for those who are unfamiliar with BentoBox, it's really an idea that anyone can create a lending pair with one asset token and one collateral token with a specific oracle. Basically, in my opinion, the creator can define the parameters him or herself.

So could you share more about how like BentoBox exactly works and the other details such as all these oracles that you support as well as like what's BentoBox plus? Sure. So Bento is part of the BentoBox, which are two different things in itself. The BentoBox is the infrastructure.

infrastructure part where you could be building anything on it. There is absolutely no limit. Anything, wherever you have a token in there, there's no need to do any approve. There's no need to, it is very capital efficient gas wise also. So this is the Bento box in itself. Bento is,

It is a platform where you can have isolated lending pairs, like you just said, flexible oracle. It's not just about like SushiSwap, TWAP oracle. It's also about Chainlink, Bank Protocol, Compound oracles, and so on and so on. Like even newer projects that are dedicated to this area of DeFi could ultimately get integrated in the...

in this in the bento which is amazing in my opinion because it leveled the field for new entrants and then what is quite interesting is bento book is is not optimizing for um for tvl in itself you know like the bento is gonna have um liquid interest rate meaning that they're always gonna be um the higher the interest is gonna go the higher um

the less used the pair is. So for example, if someone borrows a very large position on a pair, E-dai for example, every eight hours, the percentage of interest is going to change and it is going to go up to a thousand percent if nobody is coming with capital. Meaning that as soon as someone takes a position,

people, users are incentivized to come get this very sweet APY and making sure that people taking positions are able, whatever is the size. And then the last, I guess, part, which is very interesting, is that all of the assets can be used for flash loans or strategies, et cetera, for additional revenues. Obviously, we don't want to have like any risky strategies in there to make sure that, you know, the capital is safe.

But for sushi, the first strategy that makes sense is to stake all of the sushi in the bento for the sushi bar. So while the asset is being lent to some people, they're still earning interest at the same time. So really, the idea of the eight hours...

Was that coming from the kind of perpetual swaps or like the funding rate? Or like, where did that come from? I think the beginning, so Boring Crypto is the architect of this project. And I think that was just the, it was not too long, not too short. It is commonly used for perps, like you just said.

At this point, you know, if we need to put, if we need to have some change in there, we will probably do so. We are currently testing everything as we record this podcast. But once it is fully out and, you know, not in soft launch, because the way it's going to be set up is we are currently doing formal verification for the product.

Once Bento Plus is out, I guess there's going to be a lot of things that are going to have changed and improved. So for now, we're going to go for eight hours. And in the future, maybe less, maybe more, depending on how is the demand for the product. Yeah, I definitely see this as an interesting product in the sense that there aren't that many people offering Bento.

separate pools for margin trading. So it's interesting to see what are the pools going to be set up by people and then seeing what are the number of leverage people would like to take on those pools.

So looking forward to that. At the moment, we're thinking of 3x at top, I think. If we can leverage, you know, layer two at some point in the future to get even higher and, you know, like get some more quote unquote risky loans with the Bento, we would probably tackle this or play with it. But

We don't want it to be too quote-unquote degen. So we're going to keep it at 3x to see how it goes. It's always important to keep in mind some of these tokens are going to be very volatile. So

But the fact that the risk is isolated, one pair could "fail" or crash and not affect the whole system. So it's going to be very interesting to see the first set of liquidation and markets that "fails". Hopefully we don't get there because people are not too degen, but who knows? It can happen and we're really looking forward to it because that's how you battle test a product. Absolutely.

And then the M&A post that Andre put out there a few months ago, I think it was a few months ago, certainly got a lot of attention about how Sushi and your community is going to work together

So while some people were pretty excited for the partnership that you had there, inevitably, there are also some sushi holders wondering, oh, if working with Yearn will encroach the time and energy that you guys originally could dedicate to sushi only, right? So this next question I would like to ask is,

What's the relationship between Dairy Swap and SushiSwap version 2? So I don't think it's a surprise to everyone, but Dairy Swap is coming from Andre. We are going to take all of the steps to execute on his vision. And then we're going to add some of our ideas to it.

which is, you know, we call SushiSwap AMM V2 at the moment. And we're going to make them together and actually launch them. So DairySwap is not like a product by itself. At the moment, it is a set of ideas, a set of code that are not, you know, completed. They're not finished. It is our task to make them production ready, to make them without any economical flaws or problems.

And once this is done, they're both going to be launching at the same time under the same name, actually, which is not out yet.

But yeah, this is kind of the deal about Daryswap and Sushiswap AMM. It's funny, I remember I was looking through the Discord channel of Sushiswap and for a while people were asking, oh, what is Daryswap? Is it just like Sushiswap version 2, AMM version 2? And then finally you gave a hint.

And then the committee member was like, "Oh, Ma Aki actually got to admit that this is just exactly the same." So I thought that was a pretty funny hike and see thing. So other than this Dairyswap, what else are you guys working or collaborating with Yearn at the moment that you can share?

Right now, I can't share everything, but there's some very good ideas thrown around about MEV capabilities, which are very up and coming. I won't share more about it because I don't think I'm authorized to talk about it. But then we also are talking with a Layer 2 scaling solution. The problem here with Layer 2, and I guess we don't want to

commit too much to one in particular is that Yearn cannot exist without partners. They cannot exist without Aave, Compound and so on and so on. Sushiswap being one of them too, obviously. They need to deploy their capital, they need to deploy their strategies, so they are not in a rush to move in there too.

For SushiSwap though, it does make sense. For Cream.finance, it does make sense. For Pickle, it is similar to Yearn. So I think it's going to be more like a full-on migration once everyone is ready, then one participant rushing somewhere and there is no network effect or nothing else aside from swapping on the layer 2.

Because even today, it's actually available right now. If you want to go have some cheap swaps, you can go on Newprint. I haven't tested their new AMM yet, personally. I did test their DEX back then when it was launched. But yeah, you need more than just claiming that you can swap for a fraction of the price. Because there's a cost to go on the Layer 2, capital-wise. And then you kind of

"stuck" in there without nothing to do, then it's not very interesting. Composability on layer 1 is more powerful than people think, I believe personally.

Yeah, I'll come back to that question. I actually wanted to talk to you about that too. But in addition to that, I remember, I think just a few days ago, Andre put up a post about the SushiSwap V2 single-sided exposure and permanent loss mitigation work. So on that one, is it ready? Or when is it expected to be ready? Could you share more?

So right now it is in the final stage of audit with Pexio. I cannot share too much about it because I don't think... I will let Andre introduce his own solution, I guess. But what is very interesting about it is he has been trying to solve this for a very long time. I mean, in the post it was highlighted that there has been countless versions of it. It is not an easy problem. I don't...

I don't think it's a perfect solution yet because of many other factors, especially if we consider that we're going to have multiple assets in the index soon for pairs. It's going to be similar to balance server quickly. So it is easy for, I guess, investors.

half and half assets for pools with half and half assets. And, you know, Banker is doing some very interesting stuff on this side, but I don't think it's perfect yet too. I think it's a mix of, you know, tweaking the curve, making sure that you can have leverage in there with, you know, for example,

bento or the seal so sushi impermanent loss protection which is what it's called at the moment we're probably gonna figure out a better name for this at some point but yeah andre is kind of completing this solution at the moment as we speak it's not fully functional i do believe that it's more question of weeks than anything else um i do have the code in front of me actually i'm looking at it

Let's say you want to deposit one ETH and the respective, for example, USDC into a 50-50 pool. So at the deposit, the ETH is worth $1,000. So you put one ETH and one USDC into a 50-50 pool. So a total of $2,000 in value, right? You interact with the protocol, which takes out a loan. So 2K to finance this.

This is interest-free. There's no interest to it. The loan is used to buy 1 ETH and 1,000 USDC and deposit into the pool and send you the LP token. When you withdraw, you pay back the 2,000 in value and you get your rewards. This is currently the spec that I have. So you're borrowing to the AMM and not pooling your own asset. And the protocol takes on the IL. But, you know, this is kind of tricky at the moment, I think. And that's why, you know...

That's why it's not out. And it's only for the advanced user at the moment.

It can fail. I do think it can fail at the moment. That's why we're monitoring it. But it's a very interesting take on this problem, I do think. It does assume that, you know, the risk is offset to someone else. And we had talks about kind of mitigating IL and, you know, like impermanent loss by SLP. So people willing to have more risk exposure and

and so on and so on could act as a backstop for people willing to quote-unquote pay to get protection. So LP can decide to have skin in the game and get rewarded for it if, you know, like the prizes and crash. But yeah, it's kind of a tricky, it's a tricky, I guess, problem. You can solve in many different ways. Not all of them works and have the same risk profile.

but we're going to see something emerge from it at some point, I think. There's also other projects like White Earth Finance working on something like this. I do think it's a matter of time before we see full IL protection from

decks or protocols and so on. That's definitely a good take. I did hear about Whiteheart. I don't know it enough to really comment more about it. But I think at the end of the day, to solve any of these problems, there's always two sides of the party. One of them being the risk taker. Your point for this case is you're transferring some of the risk to the protocol. So I think it's definitely going to be interesting to watch

you know, how it plays out. And then the next question, I actually would like to learn more about the latest protocol by LabX. So Marin, like it was branded as the first liquid-based product in the sushi brand to help sushi improve its liquidity many times.

So what is Marin? So Marin right now is still in the idea phase. I don't think Levex expected so much enthusiasm from everyone about it. It is very interesting. It is a way to bridge CeFi with DeFi.

So we want to bring, you know, like centralized exchange customers, which are, you know, I think centralized exchange are very important in our space because without them, we wouldn't be able to onboard anyone. I think decentralization at the moment cannot fix the on-ramp problem. Maybe in the future, perhaps. I don't know. I hope so. Because...

What if you know regulation becomes so adversarial to to you know retail and they're blocked from buying Bitcoin or Ethereum and so on and so on that would be very detrimental to everyone But anyways, that's another topic if we want to stick to what is very interesting the French Hill franchise pools and HM pack pools this is basically a way for them to product advisor their assets and

their customers' assets, obviously, in a safe manner where they can provide liquidity. And instead of just being exposed to the IL and zero point, the normal fee, they can actually tweak it and make it a subpool

where they can have a higher percentage of the fees. So for example, you could have like a liquidity pool from Gemini with, I don't know, a fee of,

0.75% for any of the transaction going through it, or even 10%. That could be possible. And this sub pool act as not a direct, I guess, pool in a sushi swap. It's more like a complimentary to it. And that's why we're charging higher fees in this set of pools is to make sure that they can edge their risk and they won't take any, uh,

losses for their customers because it wouldn't be it wouldn't make any sense for customers depositing sushi eat on Gemini or Binance or Coinbase or FTX whatever you want to whichever is the exchange and it will provide like minimal risk exposure and you know maximum user benefits to them for both sides which is I think very interesting it's all about bridging the both sides both sides

It's not about fighting. I think some of these exchanges are going to be very pleased with the solution that we come up with. At the moment, it's still in the ideation phase. It's not completed yet. It's not even coded yet. We have only the skeleton. And this was, I think, a very interesting idea when it came up to me. And that's why so many people are excited about it. All we want is to make sure the assets are not sleeping.

because they can be beneficial to everyone. And since the start of SushiSwap, all these incentives didn't create more assets in DeFi. All of the liquidity mining incentives and so on and so on, not just of Sushi, but of Compound and Wi-Fi on Uniswap, it didn't just make capital appear. It was all there, just sitting on the sideline doing absolutely nothing.

And I think this is just the next step for us, for the communities to make sure that we productivize assets that are not just from the user, but also from the biggest holders, which are sex. And yeah, this is the franchise pool from SushiSwap. I would assume like the franchise pool with Binance was the first step, right?

So the franchise pool came up from Levex directly. There was no involvement from any exchange or Binance and so on and so on. It really just came up from him. He just wanted to have the next step to make sure that we have 10x, 20x more liquidity in SushiSwap. Because the more liquidity there is, the better the trade, the better the spread, the better

it benefits every single one in the ecosystem. So yeah, that's where it came from. We'll see. I don't think it's going to be implemented by LevX himself. We're going to have the whole core team work together with him to make sure that it is implemented. We're going to also refine the solution. We're going to get some feedback from the exchanges itself too. I'm already in touch with LevX

a bunch of them. I do think, um, I guess the first, if I had to take a bet, the first franchise pool are going to take from exchange are like, um, they're ready to innovate and take some risks. Um, I do think we have some big supporters among them. So it's no secret that, you know, FTX is a big proponent of sushi. Uh, I think OKEx will be, are going to probably be interested to Binance, um,

Who knows about maybe some American exchange that would be amazing. I know the legal field is different for them. So yeah, we'll see. Yeah, yeah. I think that this is super powerful in the sense that like you get like each of these exchanges get to kind of strike their own deal with SushiSwap. And at the same time,

their risk, like their downside risk was relatively protected given like it's a sub pool. So I'd be curious to see like how this play of CD5 thing plays out. And at the end of the day, like you're exactly right. For many of these SIPA institutions, they always had a problem, you know, finding the high yield with low cost.

So essentially, this is something that they have an alternative. Instead of looking for some counterparties to give out the money, they instead park their money into the pools on sushi, and then they can generate some yield and kind of just like split. It's definitely going to be win-win for both sides. So I thought that was a pretty interesting initiative offered directly from Lefebvre for sure.

These pools, these subpools, I don't see also why they wouldn't be incentivized in Sushi to get the ball rolling at first. Who knows, maybe we're going to see like a Sushi plus BNB pool for Binance or, you know, like something like OKEx and Sushi or FTT Sushi for people contributing to these pools. Because like I said earlier, I don't see Sushi as...

money actually like I see it more as a vote and I think that's how you bridge community if you the more voice can be heard in the governance the better the product and the protocol is going to evolve

So this is very key, I think. And if you had to ask me myself the order, I want to, I guess, quote unquote, incentivize these people or I mean participants. And I think governance is not, you know, set for sushi. This is just ideas. But I think governance

what we want to add in the governance is first of all, LPs because they are the one providing liquidity and then developers. I think they are very important in our protocol growth, traders and users in third. And then fourth is everyone else. Even I would say people that don't necessarily are using the product can always be critical.

Even if they don't own sushi, I read everything that is said about sushi that is negative, that is positive. I think it's, you need to stay humble. You need to make sure that you don't get the big head or else. I think it's very important.

Otherwise, you shut yourself to innovation, you shut yourself to criticism, you don't see what you're doing that is wrong, and so on and so on. So yeah, I think incentives, double yield,

are going to be very key to these subpools in the future. Yeah, you definitely touched upon a few interesting points, one being like these are the bridges of these communities

And then the fact, the second one being the fact that BNB and FTD, these are extremely liquid tokens. The fact that there will be like pairs between it already means there will be better liquidity for sushi as well. So I think both of them are going to be very powerful to empower the sushi community.

And then this discussion actually leads to, very naturally leads to the next question I would like to discuss with you. It's on the crosschain and integration front. So you previously said to me that crosschain was one of the things that you got very excited about. So could you share a bit more about the crosschain and then the integration you have with ThorChain

and also the work you've been exploring with Kusama, the canary chain of Polkadot. So this is very different for both. I think there are different solutions for Torchchain. It is very simple. On the Ethereum blockchain, if we want to have...

Bitcoin, if you want to have Monero, if you want to have other type of assets that are key, there will be, I think, very few solutions that are going to succeed. Even Zcash in there, if you want to include it, there's many teams working on, you know,

assets that are, for example, like RENBTC, TBTC and so on and so on. I think they have a place. I think they are not perfect yet. I'm not sure if we're going to get there. It is very tricky. But the way I see it is if we can provide in the front end of Sushi a place where you can easily do this transaction to come from Bitcoin to ETH,

It doesn't matter by what it is powered, but so far, from what I've seen from the Torching team, it would be very simple to implement and we can make it happen, which is important. And the way it works is that would be a referral fee for SushiSwap. We wouldn't be earning from the swap in itself, but all of the fees generated in the referral would go to XSushi holders.

So this is the way on, I guess, Ethereum for PolkaChain, which is completely different. It's actually built in from what I understand. I'm not 100% familiar with it because we cannot test it at the moment, which is making things harder for me to assert and everything. And

The truth is maybe in one or two months, once we have everything live on Polkadot, I will be able to explain more in details. But so far, it's going to be natively supported from what I've heard on the ecosystem blockchain.

So once I have more details on this side, I will share more. But for Torchain, it's pretty simple. It's going to be, we're going to integrate their solution on our front end and we're going to give all the referral fees to Sushi's holder.

Yeah, I mean, I personally am very excited for ThorChain, what they've been doing. A lot of people think, you know, the asset cross-chain, you know, the wrapped version of Bitcoin is already unlocking a lot of the liquidity. But really what ThorChain enables is

like basically you just like it's for for people with like easy understanding they can just allow people to trade cross chain without wrapping any of these assets i think that would be massively massively powerful um especially given all these chains are coming live they're making that and then there will be more asset issue to it so i think you know the fact that it's powerful and it is being integrated

into Sushi front end. I think that will be interesting. Sorry, go ahead. I mean, I think what is key is to make sure that it's frictionless for someone that owns Bitcoin to come in the ETH ecosystem because that's where all the action is. I don't know if torching is going to be ultimately, I guess, the winning solution or else, but I want to make sure that we empower as much people

people as possible to solve this problem because it's important, a trustless way to bridge all these blockchains. And to be honest, maybe the wrapped alternative was still going to be very prominent in the ecosystem and there's going to be more liquidity for wrapped Bitcoin even if it's a custodian or quote unquote centralized solution.

We'll see how it goes. I think I'm not ready to call like just a winner in itself. Yeah. I think it wouldn't make any sense. I think, you know, BoringDAO is doing some interesting stuff with OBTC. TBTC is interesting. BrandBTC is interesting. It's kind of hard to just pick one. Competition breeds innovation. So we'll see. Like that's just good for us people that wants to find the perfect competition.

Bitcoin on Ethereum. Yeah, I mean, that's for sure. I'm just saying the fact that ThorChain is very different from what REN or Keap is. And then threshold signature tech, it's really, really complicated. I definitely am not saying they are the winner or anything, but I think there aren't that many people who are working on the same solution as they are. And

So we'll be definitely interested to watch how it goes going forward. But I think right now they're one of the leaders for sure. And then for Kusama, I think what...

it will be interesting to see how Moonbeam's development plays out because that's, I think, essentially what they're working on to kind of bridge Ethereum with Polkadot. And of course, we're seeing this pair chain options coming up for first like Rokoko and then Kusama, sorry, for Rokoko after it stabilizes and then like for Kusama and then later on for Polkadot.

So yeah, I think right now it's too early to say how it is, but I think it'll be cool if actually SushiSwap can be live when Kusama started to work. So I think I'll be monitoring this one as well.

And then related to crashing, you guys are also under exploration of layer twos. I read the post. So this is another hot topic that everyone's talking about. And then you mentioned in the post that you're prioritizing the work with Matterlabs, which is essentially the entity behind ZK Road Up. So how far are you guys on that?

So they have a version of Uniswap v2 that was a personal last time we spoke.

uh which if you know is identical to SushiSwap at the moment but the thing is instead of just focusing on this which is going to be deprecated in the next few months why why not wait a little bit more and get you know Bento get SushiSwap mmv2 up and running uh before you know committing to layer two I think that's what is key and they're also you know um

releasing a lot of interesting stuff with Zinc, which is the way to bring Ethereum smart contracts to their ZK-Zinc platform or roll-ups.

to make it easy to port the code. So we're waiting for this before taking any steps forward. And like I said previously, we want to move with the whole Yarn ecosystem in sync to make sure that it is beneficial for everyone. I'm not 100% sure that we're going to move with MatterLab 100%. Maybe it's going to be OVM at the end of the day. It always depends on the manufacturer. It depends on...

The core dev depends on the decision of Joe or new CTO. It all depends on the time that we have on hands that wants to work on Layer 2. Levex is very familiar with Layer 2. Joe also has a very good opinion of that. MatterLab has been very supportive. That's why I put their name in there.

They work with Curve too. And I've been very impressed with the results of Curve on ZK-Sync. Gitcoin also use them. They've been very open with us. I haven't heard anything from Optimistic yet. Hopefully it goes well. I've heard some very good comments from the version of Synthetix on it. So there is no rush, even though the network is very bad at the moment as we speak.

I do think that if we see

synthetics or even Uniswap vTree going there first, I don't think it would be catastrophic for Sushi because that would make the network less congested and it will also give us the time to see what works and what doesn't. Because the thing is you have two weeks from what I remember to get your asset out of Uniswap or synthetics, which between you and me doesn't seem very appealing.

We'll see if they can make this lower. Hopefully they can because that kind of reduced all of the arb and yeah, I'm very, very curious about Uniswap v3 and I hope that it's going to be kicking ass to be honest with you. I hope it's going to be better than sliced bread because it's been so secretive right now that nobody knows exactly what it is and if it exists. I know it does but

they better bring the big guns. I'm very excited to see what they've been working on for so long. Exactly. I have a post about how Uniswap works versus SushiSwap works.

It's going to come up a few days later. I had some pretty interesting comparison in that one. I can share with you later about that. But since you mentioned Synthetix, Uniswap, and Aave, they are exploring Optimism. So I'm curious to see your opinion about the interoperability with other DeFi protocols. Let's say you actually port yourself onto ZK Roadup versus some of the other ones like use Optimism.

optimism what what are you gonna do it or are you just gonna suppose like not and drop interoperate with them or do you expect sushi to actually deploy two version of this itself on two different L2 that's interesting

splitting liquidity wouldn't make any sense in my opinion between you know like what happened if we have like a sushi swap on mainnet on optimism on zk sync to make sure that you know everyone can be served that's very hard that's a very hard future to believe in

I don't think that's how it's going to be working. I think everyone is going to move to the best solution. I saw that, you know, Connect's network is doing some very cool stuff to bridge both of them. So maybe, you know, like we can live in a world where SushiSwap is on ZK rollout, Uniswap is on Optimism, OVM.

And then we have some mainnet application adapts doing some other things and they all can connect. Hopefully that's where we're heading. I think this seems very complex in itself. Our motto right now is wait and see. There's no way we should be the first or, you know, like rushing things. It's better to take a step back, see what works, what doesn't.

And hopefully, you know, like, Layer 2s are more secure than sidechain. I mean, some people have been asking, why are we not moving to XDAI? Why are we not thinking about Matic? And so on and so on. The scaling solutions are here today, I think, for sidechains, and they work. Same for Layer 2. It's about to come online as we speak. But there is, like, literally, like, no rush to be the ad because...

It's way too early, I think, personally. We'll see. But this would be like, I would love to have Jo next to me, being able to tell you everything about both of the pitfalls of each solution and why right now layer one is good for us. Well, yeah, I spend a significant amount of time on different layer twos.

Actually, where I'm working at is Spark Pool, which is the largest Ethereum mining pool in the world. So we always spend a lot of time talking about L2 solutions and whatnot, and even Ethereum 2.0. Honestly, there's not a single answer to your question, like which one is the best versus like not. But I mean, even just for Matterlabs, the smart contract capability is not even there. So I think that's even further for discussion.

So I think the only thing that most of the DeFi protocols, like to exactly your point, what they will do is just kind of watch how things play out for Synthetix, for Aave, for Uniswap later and then see if they are going to port on optimistic product. We have people creating their own chain too, companies going with compound chain. Yeah, yeah. It is, you know, like,

There's not one solution yet. When we find the best, I guess, Sushi will be one of the first to adopt it. But right now, it's all theories. It's all suppositions. And that's why in the roadmap, it was very clear. We're going to wait and see. We are favoring one solution. But I think there's no point in moving by ourselves. And we're going to move in sync with the whole yearn ecosystem. That's fun. Okay.

Okay, switching gear. So one of the important points that you've been constantly making was how SushiSwap is very keen to drive value to the Sushi token holders. So what are some of the 16 channels of value proposition for the Sushi token holders? Can you name some? So value proposition, you mean all we're going to be accruing our revenues to the Sushi holders, right? That's exactly right. So right now there's the fee for each swaps. We're thinking about...

BentoBox is also going to have a 10% going straight to big sushi holders. We have like some, you know, everything with ThorChain is going to, the referral fees are going to accrue to sushi holders. This is not decided yet, and I don't want to talk too much about it, but what is going to be happening on, I guess, other chains is,

might or might not accrues to ERC20 holders of Sushi. I don't see a world where every swap that is happening on, for example, our version on Polkadot is going to stay there, unless, you know, the community decides so. But it will just, you know, like kind of make different X Sushi across, you know, two other chains. I don't see why all of the revenues wouldn't accrues to only the people on Polkadot.

for the original tokens. I think that would make sense. But this is all up to discussion by the community and we'll see how they decide to play out this vote.

Because the truth is, right now everything that is happening on Serum, on Serum Solana or even Polkadot. They are just getting started. We don't know if it's going to pick up traction or not. I hope so, personally, because I want to see competition across multiple layer one. Even though I'm a very big proponent of Ethereum, I think it's where all of the community and action is happening. I hope

you know, it stays the same and we can just scale with ETH 2.0. But the truth is if for a specific use case at some point in the future, we would need to have other blockchain, I hope that, you know, Sushi can be in there to facilitate swaps of any kind, not just tokens. That is very important, I think.

And aside from that, you know, value actual is very simple at the moment. And I don't think we need to come to get it more. The rent seeking aspect of sushi was kind of necessary at the beginning to make sure that we have the funding to our, you know, like top tier talent to make sure that we had like an LT treasury where we could be

financing all of our fund, all of our operation, because we were going against, you know, a project like Bouncer that raised a lot of dollars, similar to Uniswap, even Banker, you know, if you don't remember, they had like a $150 million ICO. This is a huge amount of capital that can be deployed for many things. Right now it is sitting idle, but I think they are about to showcase what you can do with money if used right.

So yeah, that's interesting to hear. So now that we've talked a lot about the private related stuff and also the Sushi token, I'd be curious to learn more about the decentralized organization of Sushi because you also talk about governance a lot. So who are the core contributors of SushiSwap and then how did you guys find each other?

Sure. So there's way many more. There's way many people involved in SushiSwap that people know. I can tell you that we have every single week, we have two stand up meetings. Right now, our guest list is 15 people that are actively contributing to Sushi. In there, we have developers. So Boring Crypto is one of them. I'm Software is one of them.

Obviously there's me, there is Jiro, which is a core dev, Omakase, you have Levex and so on and so on. Most of them are technical people, but we also have Mia, which is currently one of our point of contact in China for the Chinese community. We have designers, Chester and Kastri.

We have Keno, which is a brand new addition. We have Joe, which is the CTO. And also even contributors that are enabled by Grant. So we have Kami Bisou, we have Gompachi. They're both working on different products. Gompachi is working on the Miso launchpad. And then Kami Bisou is working on the impermanent loss and everything related to helping this new solution by Android.

And then, I mean, I could go on and there's like even people involved in the Discord like Luffy. But the thing is...

There's one single point where everyone is meeting up and that's a discord. I don't think I've seen anyone get involved in the community that didn't pass from there or got known in there first. We have various channels with people involving themselves in marketing, in development, in the support even. So we have people that are answering questions of...

I guess beginners in the ecosystem or DeFi. So whenever you want to withdraw liquidity or add liquidity, claim even more sushi, like it's not easy for everyone, even though it seems natural to us, I guess, power users. It's still the unknown for me. That's interesting. But how do you organize the work? You mentioned quite a few people.

like on either the core team or who are relatively loose but also engaged. So how do you organize the work under this distributed setting? Is there a workflow that you follow and coordinate with your team members? So, so far, the way it works is everyone that got

I would say, or that is receiving a grant. There's a self-starter. They're not waiting for my key to give any orders or so on and so on. We align under objective key objects for, I guess, the month or in this case, the year. And then it removes every single aspect of leaders or like a force that is throwing things away. We just execute in sync

Towards, you know, like a vision where we are making the best AMM or the best decks, you know, that's mainly like the main motivation, I think. Yeah. And everyone has their own reason. Myself is different than, for example, Omakase or then Jiro and...

even like boring or Keno, like everyone is doing what they like to work on. And then what it creates is, yes, it can be difficult to follow or keep track of, but you are getting, you know, a mix of people that are working towards the same goal. And we do need someone maybe in the ops to coordinate a little bit more because we're growing so fast. But, you know, I do think this person is going to stand up by itself at some point and

and we're going to see it glue everyone together. Right. Yeah, I remember you and I talked about this before, and then I was saying you need a more universal messaging to let the community know. And I'm certain that you guys are gradually getting towards that

And I mean, the fact that you are putting out this roadmap post already shows the effort of being more organized and strategic. So I look forward to seeing more and more of that from the team. That's the thing with this roadmap. That's the thing with this roadmap. I mean, I've put it out there, but this is not...

even I would say what Sushi is obligated to do, right? It's just, it's a suggestions. It is what I would like, you know, people to work on, but I cannot, I won't, you know, force any devs to do anything. And even like, what I liked is that

I make sure to make it open for community members in the forum to suggest things. And in exchange, they can get sushi. Right now, it's 500 for any ideas that we pick that is implemented. And I do think what it creates is that we have a more engaged community than some other project. We make sure to reward contributors, no matter what is their, I guess, amount of effort.

even if it's very little. I remember at some point we had an exploit happening in the sushi bar where things were not being served properly. This community member got rewarded just for making sure that he was raising a flag for it. He didn't do anything other than making sure that he was monitoring the sushi bar and said, "Hey, something is wrong. We're not receiving our rewards." And we just rewarded him for that.

And even actually like the people that exploited the sushi bar got rewarded because we want him to collaborate with us. We want him to make sure that for bento, you know, he's going to be helping us to test it. And like, yeah, that's pretty much it. You know, like everyone got refunded. Nobody had any loss for this exploit. And that was very, I think that set the tone for sushi and how we do things, simply put.

Yeah, this case that you gave, this example you gave was actually quite accurate. I have a friend who was actually offering half of the liquidity of one of the on-demand pools. And then one day the reward weren't showing properly. And I can just reach out someone, I don't know who exactly it is, on Discord. And then within a few hours, that thing just got fixed. So it got pretty, pretty impressive.

So I think it's exactly this kind of very flexible, also responsive culture that makes what sushi is today.

So I definitely see the upside of being, you know, being able to for everyone to work on something that they're interested in and then constantly just be self-inspired and monitored. I guess we are already up to time to the last question of this podcast. I just wanted to end this podcast with a very fun question.

You once asked me what's my favorite sushi. So I'd like to ask you also, what is your favorite sushi and why? So that's a very good question. I do ask this to almost everyone because I'm a very curious person and I think I always want to discover new delicious sushis. Myself, I really enjoy... So nigiri, I love...

Otoro, personally, this is one of my favorites. I do also enjoy Masago. So the red Masago is delicious, in my opinion. And then always finishing Ennio Macchiazzi or Sushi Meal with Tamago. The egg one, for people that don't know. But yeah, like, but you know, a good sashimi salmon is delicious. All of them are pretty much delicious.

You know, I don't have this name for nothing. This was picked before SushiSwap. My key was... It's not even related to SushiSwap at first. It's just destiny. I think I was meant for this. But for this project. That's funny. I hope it answers your question.

yeah of course I was going to say like you stole my answer because my answer was toro yeah I actually know very few people enjoy tamago sushi so that was pretty interesting yeah so I would like to thank you for joining me at this podcast today it was a really informational and comprehensive one hopefully your audience can benefit from listening to this episode thank you again thank you to everyone listening and have a good one Mabel