Dialogue with core members of Sushi: SushiSwap is a scalable ecosystem

Original Title: "Exclusive Interview | SushiSwap Core Member Omakase: More Than Just an AMM, But a DeFi Ecosystem"

Interviewee: Omakase, Core Member of SushiSwap

Written by: Elponcho

Through the conversation, SushiSwap core member Omakase expressed his views on topics such as the team's working methods, decentralized governance, product planning, and DeFi regulation:

• What is Omakase's main work, and how does the team operate?
• There are differences in the VC financing proposal; what is the team's perspective?
• What are the Sushi team's thoughts on Uniswap?
• Sushi is expanding into many different businesses; what are the plans? What kind of users do they hope to attract?
• What DeFi pain points do they want to solve, and what is Trident's positioning?
• What are the current plans for cross-chain and L2?
• Is liquidity mining necessary? What future trends do they see?
• What is their view on regulation? Is there still a risk with anonymity?
• With Axie becoming popular, will GameFi be a focus for MISO's upcoming IDO?

What is Omakase's main work, and how does the team operate?

The organization is fluid; this is how Sushi operates.

Omakase: I joined Sushi on the first day the Sushi smart contract code was released on GitHub. At that time, I contacted Chef Nomi, saying I had experience with YAM and UNI interfaces and could help with interface and infrastructure development. Since then, I have been involved in front-end, operations, contract development, operations, and business development. You can basically ask me anything related to the Sushi community.

The core team and the community are very closely connected. The only difference is probably the continuous dedication and the time one is willing to spend. It’s not easy to become a core team member; we have some developers who built very specific features and then became community members. The organization is fluid, which is chaotic for most people, but that’s how Sushi operates.

There are differences in the VC financing proposal; what is the team's perspective?

Phantom Trope truly showcases the power of the Sushi community and governance.

Omakase: Every idea is imperfect when it is first proposed. It only becomes refined after public scrutiny and iteration: that’s the power of the community. Building and publicly discussing a vision among 50,000 community members is not easy, but it is necessary. Establishing a vision and direction among community members is also not easy, but these efforts strengthen the project.

People always comment on how fast Sushi develops features, which illustrates the power of our community. Sushi is at a critical turning point. We have built many financial prototypes and features, and we can already call it an ecosystem. We are no longer just an AMM. For such a multifunctional product, it is time to form and solidify a comprehensive vision.

With the introduction of Layer 2, Sushi's user experience will be on par with centralized exchanges. This is a task confirmed by the community. We have a large community base, and the community presents us with many product demands and feedback, which we naturally incorporate into our planning.

Perhaps many have forgotten that the core of this proposal is actually to strengthen our community and prepare for our next phase. What is the next phase? Sushi is now a DeFi blue-chip, and what we want to do is build an ecosystem. However, DeFi blue-chips are very small in the broader capital market. It is time to let more people know about DeFi and participate in it. This also means we will expand governance to institutional participants who can bring better proposals and experiences regarding growth. Differences are a good thing; they mean people are discussing and solving those tricky issues.

I am encouraged to see some institutions playing such an active role in discussions and governance, and I welcome them to join the Sushi community. The larger and more vibrant our community, the more the network effect of Sushi can continue, not just in the DeFi space.

Personally, I find it interesting to see so many VCs willing to buy SUSHI without discounts. This is just to participate in governance and be part of our growing community, which really redefines "participation" and how to be accountable for "constructive participation." Decentralized organizations are a very new concept, not even a year old, but they will continue to improve. Interestingly, Sushi will play an important role in setting standards and processes for this new type of organization.

What are the Sushi team's thoughts on Uniswap?

Uniswap is a fantastic team.

Omakase: I have met many Uniswap team members in real life, and they are all very experienced. Of course, in many ways, Sushi and Uniswap are fundamentally different.

Uniswap is more like a traditional company that has been around for four years. Sushi, on the other hand, is a decentralized organization, which can be seen from our rapid iteration of features and product growth. We are not even a year old!

Sushi has far surpassed being just an AMM and is gradually growing into an ecosystem. In this system, your digital assets can access a range of financial tools. If you pay attention to Sushi, you will find that our focus has always been on network effects.

ONSEN welcomes new projects, which expands liquidity mining. MasterChef v2 allows projects to add their own rewards. BentoBox allows any team to deploy their dapp in this app store, easily earning interest while accessing existing balances. The new AMM Trident allows anyone to add new pools and curve types.

Everything Sushi builds is a win-win. Others can build on our open-source platform and succeed, and we grow together with them. This is very different from traditional companies.

Sushi is expanding into many different businesses; what are the plans? What kind of users do they hope to attract?

Sushi is not just an AMM, but an ecosystem.

Omakase: Your observation is correct! Sushi is not just an AMM, but an ecosystem. If you go to our login page, you can see the community mission statement: Welcome to the home of DeFi. Your home starts here.

What does this mean? First, it means we want to unlock all financial functions on a decentralized infrastructure. Any digital asset can access features like swapping, lending, leverage, limit orders, and you can even use lending features to build options and hedge your trades. All of this is within one ecosystem. Currently, you can access these features on 12 chains, and we will continue to deploy on other chains.

Second, it also means Sushi will capture the horizontal digital asset supply chain: fair launches, auctions, growth, incentives, and management. We want Sushi to be the best place for projects to launch and thrive. Sushi is the Amazon of the digital asset space.

Blockchain is the most efficient settlement layer, and digital assets represent an alternative mechanism for current value creation. This is very powerful and will provide new economic opportunities for many people. If you consider the current value creation system: it favors Americans or those who can set up American companies, obtain venture capital, or pay investment banks for their companies to go public. This means if you are not American and cannot raise $20 million, you are effectively excluded from the value creation system.

Digital assets represent something core to the internet: an effective and fair system that everyone can participate in. Therefore, we want to attract as many users as possible. We firmly believe that Sushi will be the easiest platform to operate. In defining standards, Sushi will unlock DeFi for everyone.

What DeFi pain points do they want to solve, and what is Trident's positioning?

Trident will be the ultimate AMM.

Omakase: As I mentioned earlier: Sushi is not just an ecosystem; it is also a scalable ecosystem. Currently, DeFi has various pain points: fragmented products, poor user experience, lack of proper onboarding guidance, etc. Sushi's goal is to address user experience issues in the next two quarters to truly compete with centralized exchanges -- the benefits of decentralized infrastructure are: lower costs, no permission required, and accessibility for everyone.

Trident has two main advantages. First, Trident is deployed on BentoBox. The concept of virtual balances is very powerful -- in fact, most of the liquidity migrating to Trident from BentoBox can earn yields from strategies. This will nearly double the capital efficiency for liquidity providers. Simply put, exchanges typically utilize a certain amount of floating balances to earn interest, while BentoBox interacts efficiently with other yield-generating protocols.

Second, Trident will be the ultimate AMM. This means you can add any pool on it. When we launch Trident, we are actually launching four different AMMs and applying a complex routing system. As more AMM types are developed, we will continue to add them in the future, and users will never need to migrate again.

What are the current plans for cross-chain and L2?

Sushi will become chain agnostic.

Omakase: Sushi has already done well in multi-chain deployment. The twentieth time doing something is very different from the first time. We are ready for other chains suitable for deployment at any time. We have a unique limit order feature on Polygon and will soon bring it to other sidechains and the Ethereum mainnet. Ultimately, the full feature set will exist on BentoBox across different chains.

We will use Gas Relayer to integrate these BentoBoxes into a more comprehensive ecosystem. One day in the future, you will be able to perform cross-chain swaps from Ethereum while optimizing and rebalancing liquidity across chains, which is unimaginable. Sushi will become chain agnostic. Once your assets are in BentoBox, you are part of our ecosystem.

Is liquidity mining necessary? What future trends do they see?

Sushi can now operate without relying on mining rewards.

Omakase: The purpose of liquidity mining rewards is to hedge against potential losses that liquidity providers may face. Capital efficiency is crucial for reducing impermanent loss and even creating impermanent gains and more fee revenue from products. Nowadays, Sushi can achieve this without liquidity mining rewards: the new AMM will include concentrated liquidity. All liquidity positions and default balances on BentoBox will earn yields from strategies.

MasterChef v2 has introduced the concept of multiple rewards (dual mining) for each pool, which increases the APY of mining and the enthusiasm of projects to promote Sushi together.

We will launch a very user-friendly interface for projects to easily track and manage liquidity yields. This allows these projects to easily replicate Sushi's successful reward formula: if the project grows, we also grow. We repeatedly see that incentives are very important, and the ways these incentives are structured will continue to evolve, ultimately resulting in fewer token releases and potentially leading to deflation through token burning. There is no doubt that this is very beneficial for the long-term token economy.

What is their view on regulation? Is there still a risk with anonymity?

Regulation is reasonable, and industry standards are taking shape.

Omakase: Restrictions on front-end interfaces ultimately need to be discussed and decided by the community; community authorization is necessary. Personally, I do not see any controversy regarding the regulatory scrutiny of synthetic assets that are securities.

These have always been well-known securities and have always carried regulatory risks. It is precisely because of this risk that their trading volume is low, and the user experience of trading securities on conventional exchanges and apps is better. Of course, this is just my opinion; the final opinion will be made by the community. Additionally, everything on Sushi is open source: anyone can host their own interface.

Honestly, regulatory issues do not trouble me because the Sushi ecosystem is rapidly growing and setting standards. Regulators are correct; the DeFi space is very new and chaotic. But standards are forming, and existing network effects favor good participants, better code, and systems. Let me give you an example of Sushi standards, from simple to complex.

If a token is minted by a multi-signature, we can attach a badge on the token page; this does not exclude projects without multi-signatures but will give users more confidence. These standards can become more complex, and monitoring token contracts is not far-fetched. If malicious trading (determined by its nominal value) is detected interacting with the contract, a warning can be issued to prevent malicious trading frontrunning or delaying trade execution.

Such complex standards are within Sushi's capability to establish. At the end of the day, regulators care about standards. They currently do not have standards, but Sushi can provide a standard framework to enhance user protection. This is within our development and product capabilities, and it is the direction we are striving for.

Finally, I do not believe that anonymity is a protection against real life. DeFi has a culture of using pseudonyms because your background or resume does not really matter; what you do and your code are what truly matter. There is now enough metadata to identify individuals; anonymity reflects more the equality and accessibility of DeFi. If you can do something valuable, go ahead and do it!

With Axie becoming popular, will GameFi be a focus for MISO's upcoming IDO?

DeFi will deeply integrate with GameFi.

Omakase: Axie is definitely interesting, and I think there will be more innovations in the GameFi space. As mentioned earlier, the Sushi ecosystem aims to capture the horizontal digital asset supply chain, making it the best place to launch, grow, incentivize, and manage digital assets. We look forward to more similar GameFi projects launching in our ecosystem!

Frankly, we provide them with all the necessary tools that are crucial for their success. Recently, we launched auctions and also introduced dual reward pools for Yield Guild Games, which has been a huge success. But this is just the beginning, indicating that GameFi can leverage DeFi. With the launch of the Shoyu NFT platform, we will see a deeper integration of DeFi and GameFi, such as collectible NFTs in games, points in games, etc.