The much-hyped forked version of Uniswap, SushiSwap, has successfully migrated to its own platform, taking over $1.3 billion in liquidity with it.
In less than a fortnight, SushiSwap has managed to propel Uniswap to the top of the DeFi total value locked (TVL) charts, before unceremoniously dumping it back down them. TVL is a measure of how much crypto collateral has been deposited on a platform in dollar terms, and Uniswap doesn’t have much left today.
The migration occurred yesterday, September 9, and involved the moving of all liquidity pools to the new system. In order to lure liquidity providers to remain with the platform the new ‘sushi chef’ or administrator, FTX exchange chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried, promised a token distribution of 2 million SUSHIs.
Liquidity Leached
The incentive was a success and over 75% of Uniswap’s liquidity was switched over to the new SushiSwap platform. The analytics dashboard was also recreated for the new protocol and it is currently reporting that there is $1.35 billion in liquidity less than 24 hours after migration.
Uniswap conversely has seen its own liquidity slump to $348 million, but in all fairness, this is still higher than where it was before the Sushi farming frenzy began in late August. Yield farmers flocked to the platform in order to load up on its liquidity pool tokens for depositing in higher-yielding SushiSwap pools. Yearn Finance founder, Andre Cronje, points this out;
I don't have a horse in this race, but I do like accurate data
The narrative that @SushiSwap took TVL from @UniswapProtocol is simply false
Uniswap TVL pre/post Sushiswap remains unchanged
Sushiswap simply took their liquidity locusts with them
Only the liquidity locusts win pic.twitter.com/qr3UBn2paT
— Andre Cronje (@AndreCronjeTech) September 10, 2020
The move has shaken up the TVL tables on popular DeFi analytics website Defipulse.com which has yet to include SushiSwap. For that reason, it is only reporting a TVL of around $7.2 billion across all platforms at the moment.
Whales Holding The Sushi Keys
A governance vote took place to determine the nine controllers of a new multi-signature wallet that will serve as administrator for the project. It came as no surprise that the biggest bag-holders of SUSHI tokens were among the nine.
These included the current ‘chef’ Bankman-Fried, Compound Finance founder Robert Leshner, SushiSwap co-founder ‘0xMaki’, and The Block’s outspoken research director Larry Cermak. Six of the nine will need to be in agreement for any action to go forward.
Bankman-Fried has said that he wanted to take a back seat leaving the governance of the protocol in the hands of token holders.
“I may share thoughts and suggestions on it, but I’m not going to be running it, that’s up to the SUSHI holders. Ultimately, it’s not up to me long-term what happens.”
He said in an interview with Cointelegraph.
SUSHI token prices have yet to react to the move and are still down 61% on the week at $2.83 at the time of writing.
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