The Defiant

Frog Nation Hops Into SushiSwap to ‘Clean Up’ Tumultuous Exchange

Daniele Sesta's Frog Nation added SushiSwap to an ecosystem including Abracadabra and Wonderland.

By: Brady Dale Loading...

Frog Nation Hops Into SushiSwap to ‘Clean Up’ Tumultuous Exchange

The Frog Nation, a collective of crypto protocols meant to work together across multiple chains, has added SushiSwap to its ranks.

What this means remains to be seen, but in a blog post from Frog Nation lead Daniele Sesta, it seemed that the team behind protocols such as Abracadabra and Wonderland will be taking over top level management at SushiSwap.

“As a first note, Frog Nation is here to clean up and bring efficiency back into Sushi, prior to the last 3-4 months LOTs of products were being shipped, Sushi proved that it was not simply just a Uni Fork,” Sesta wrote.

Combined Ecosystem

Market reaction to the news was tepid. SUSHI traded at about $4.48 just before Sesta tweeted out the blog post on Tuesday. By Thursday morning, it had slipped to $4.16. The news of the merger does not come as a surprise to close watchers of SushiSwap. Sesta first floated the idea in SushiSwap’s forums at the end of December. In that initial proposal, Sesta wrote:

“First and foremost, Frog Nation establishes a mandate for a new service collective for Sushi and becomes a part of a combined ecosystem of Abracadabra, Popsicle Finance, and Wonderland. In the interim, this service collective retains the right to restructure Sushi and define specifically the parameters for governance at an elevated tempo.”

In his blog post, Sesta put the community on notice that there are likely to be major staff changes and a permanent change to how personnel is managed. He wrote, “In order to keep Sushi nimble and moving quickly, the Frog Nation team with the core members of Sushi will decide upon any sort of hiring, payment measures etc. Sushi now needs to ship products, [and] doing hiring via community governance makes little to no sense.”

SushiSwap has been a tumultuous community from the start.

It was founded in 2020 as a fork of Uniswap, which “vampire attacked” the O.G. automated market. SushiSwap invited Uniswap users to entrust it with their liquidity provider tokens for various Uniswap pools so that it could import their funds when SushiSwap went live (in exchange for the most generous emissions of its SUSHI tokens that would ever be emitted). It was a wild success, but before the migration could happen, the SushiSwap creator, Chef Nomi, lost the trust of the community and other leaders took over to execute the final stages of SushiSwap’s launch.

Acrimonious Culture

SushiSwap was then governed by a multisig, but 0xMaki and Joseph DeLong would eventually arise as the key day-to-day leaders of the project. In late 2020, the robo-advisor for yield, Yearn, announced that SushiSwap would merge with it, though no one was ever completely clear on what that meant. Notably, Yearn Finance’s founder Andre Cronje has been collaborating with Sesta on a new decentralized exchange on the Fantom blockchain.

Recently, both 0xMaki and then DeLong suddenly left SushiSwap amidst what appears to have become an acrimonious team culture. Joining with the Frog Nation appears to be a way for the nation to gain another large pool of liquidity to work with and for SushiSwap to gain a proven management team.

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