SushiSwap's Grey Hit By Wild Allegations of Impropriety

Less than a week after SushiSwap sought to end a period of turmoil with the election of Jared Grey as head chef, the decentralized exchange was engulfed in controversy yet again as a series of extraordinary allegations were leveled at its new hire.

On Oct. 11, a self-styled “ETH and DeFi enthusiast” called YannickCrypto accused Grey of being involved with multiple crypto scams. Then Twitter lit up with bizarre allegations that Grey had engaged in bestiality with a horse.

Operated With Integrity

In a thread, Grey denied the accusations of fraud, without addressing “the horse in the room,” as one commenter pointed out.

“I have always operated with integrity in this space,” he said. “I’ve had business failures, which [crypto Twitter] likes to scrutinize… However, baseless accusations are caustic and wrong.”

Grey did not respond to requests for comment from The Defiant.

The DEX’s native SUSHI token is down 10% in the past 24 hours.

Viral Marketing

SushiSwap appeared to make light of the bestiality accusation by posting an emoji of a horse on social media.

“This all just viral marketing for the new Sushi stable coin and we fell for it,” tweeted Cobie, a crypto influencer with 742,000 Twitter followers. Grey replied to Cobie, stating “It’s true; stable pools are coming this week.” SushiSwap retweeted the post.

Viral marketing or not, this latest episode of finger-pointing demonstrates that SushiSwap remains one of the most contentious projects in crypto. And it couldn’t come at a worse time. This year SushiSwap’s TVL has slid 87%, to $495M, compared to a 39% drop at its archrival, Uniswap.

On-Chain Vote

The Sushi community elected Grey to serve as its new head chef on Oct. 3, with the candidate receiving almost 84% of votes cast in an on-chain vote that was months in the making.

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The Defiant

Grey won the vote by securing support from a handful of large SUSHI whales, with five wallets accounting for 95% of the votes supporting his hiring. The top wallet that participated in the vote, linked to the $47B wealth manager, Golden Tree, contributed 37% of the votes supporting Grey and almost a third of the total vote.

From 2018 to January, Grey was the CEO of Bitfineon, a centralized exchange that is now defunct. Grey also led EONS, a “decentralized ecosystem for financial services” from April 2020 to this May, according to Grey’s LinkedIn profile.

Payment Network

Prior to 2020, EONS operated under the name ALQO, and was billed as a payment network built on the proprietary Falqon blockchain.

ALQO has a troubled history. According to blog posts and tweets, Grey’s accuser YannickCrypto was an ALQO community member and said he knows Grey. In the Oct. 11 tweets, YannickCrypto alleged that Grey introduced a “Web Wallet” for ALQO that was used to steal 70% of the total token supply of ALQO users.

In addition, YannickCrypto said Bitfineon charged crypto founders 1 BTC to list their tokens on the exchange but pocketed the funds without listing the assets.

False Allegations

YannickCrypto also said that in 2021 Grey “scammed some people” and infringed copyrights through a company called MultiPlex PC.

Grey summarily rejected all of YannickCrypto’s allegations as false. “Let me be clear: the accusations towards me are 100% untrue,” he tweeted.

Grey said his “business partner” stole funds from the ALQO and Bitfineon community while he was raising money from investors to launch the Bitfineon exchange.

He shared a link to a 2019 Liberio blog post that said user balances had been compromised in its wallet and blamed ALQO’s and Bitfineon’s lead developer, Kevin Collmer, for “the loss of user funds.”

Collmer, who appears to be off of social media, could not be reached for comment.

For its part, SushiSwap did not make any statements on the allegations.

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