The Defiant

"I F*cked Up. And I am Sorry:" Chef Nomi Returns $14M of ETH to SushiSwap

There’s yet another twist to this California Roll. The founder behind the Uniswap fork SushiSwap, an anonymous developer going by the name of Chef Nomi who had run off with about $14M worth of ETH and prompted accusations the project was an exit scam, today returned his stash. “To everyone. I f*cked up. And I...

By: Camila Russo Loading...

"I F*cked Up. And I am Sorry:" Chef Nomi Returns $14M of ETH to SushiSwap

There’s yet another twist to this California Roll.

The founder behind the Uniswap fork SushiSwap, an anonymous developer going by the name of Chef Nomi who had run off with about $14M worth of ETH and prompted accusations the project was an exit scam, today returned his stash.

“To everyone. I f*cked up. And I am sorry,” Nomi said in a Twitter thread today. “I was emotional, I was greedy, I was afraid.”

To everyone. I fucked up. And I am sorry.



— Chef Nomi #SushiSwap (@NomiChef) September 11, 2020

Community Decides Payout

Nomi said the community should decide how much the anonymous dev deserves for founding SushiSwap, and that he will continue to participate in the technical implementation of SushiSwap but won’t have any control or be of the governance process.

Nomi also apologized to early believers in the project and “degen friends,” including 0xMaki, Sushi Ninja, Scott Lewis, Degen Spartan and Andre Cronje, and “most importantly,” Sam Bankman-Fried and others who took control of the protocol, for their “help getting SushiSwap back when (he) almost destroyed it.”

Did the Right Thing

“He did the right thing and should be rewarded by the community accordingly,” 0xMaki told The Defiant, adding that while he expected Nomi would return part of the funds (“only 33/50%, my share”), he didn’t expect he would return all of it.

As with any new twist in this DeFi soap opera, it didn’t take long for conspiracy theories to pop up: he probably went long SUSHI before his tweet, or he only did it because he was doxxed and his family was threatened, crypto Twitter theorized.

Image source: snapshot.page

The end result from this would be to prop up the SUSHI price after it took a 70% hit following Chef Nomi’s dump. Surely it’s with that in mind that so far, over 70% of participants are voting in favor of using 100% of the funds returned to buy back SUSHI(other options are 50%, 75% or none, which has less than 1% of the vote).

SUSHI Rebounds

Image source: CoinGecko

SushiSwap yesterday successfully migrated Uniswap’s liquidity pools into its own protocol and is now the largest decentralized exchange by assets held in its smart contracts, with $1.4B of total value locked, compared with $650M in Uniswap. Uniswao is still leading by trading volume, with the double the value trading hands on the platform, compared with volume on SushiSwap.

For more on the successful migration, aka Vampire Mining, READ HERE, for an overview of the SushiSwap saga, READ HERE.

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