Fukkatsu: Make Sushi great again

Proposals
#1

Fukkatsu: Make Sushi great again

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TLDR

Sushi is amazing. Sushi is also on a death spiral: treasury went from $1b to $30m in less than a year, there’s no leadership, tech team has been reduced to a few devs, releases have been delayed and volume has plummeted. Radical action is necessary to make Sushi great again.

At Wonderland (not to be confused with Wonderland Finance), we came up with a plan to turn the ship around while it’s still possible.

Summary

During the last year, every single Sushi KPI deteriorated to a critical point. The team has been slashed, the treasury has little to no source of revenue and it’s being drained by operations with no transparency or previsibility.

We, as an activist fund, invest in protocols we believe have the potential to achieve multi-billion-dollar marketcaps but are currently underperforming. After investing, we deploy our executive and tech teams to help in the launch of new products, recruit long-term leadership, and fix what needs to be fixed. In conclusion, we steer the team back on track.

Our team is plug&play and will deliver from day 1. Even though urgent action is needed, everything we do aims for the long-term. When our engagement is over, the protocol will be in a much better place and will be in a much better situation to keep scaling.

There have been many mild proposals to change the current situation. Radical action is necessary to get Sushi back on track. We’ve done it before with other protocols and it worked.

Main issues

Sushi is amazing, a great product with a story worth telling, an off the charts brand, and a very supportive community.

But…

  1. There’s no leadership. Literally.
  2. The Treasury is at an all time low, bleeding little by little every month and with almost no source of revenue.
  3. There’s no ecosystem fund, no grants or incentives for people who are integrating or bringing volume to Sushi.
  4. Due to regulatory risk, among other things, recruiting quality talent is hard AF.
  5. Proposals go through but are never executed.
  6. Sushi’s public image is still stained from past dramas.
  7. Deployments to new chains have not translated into dominance.
  8. New projects, such as Kashi and Bentobox, have struggled to attract the attention they deserve.
  9. Trident has been delayed over and over until beta launch.

Solution

In order to bring things back on track, additional high quality working force is necessary. We’re offering a clear long term vision strategy together with senior management and technical teams that can double the current firepower overnight.

Our plan will be divided into phases.

  • Phase 0: the financial strategy that will allow Sushi to implement the remaining changes.
  • Phase 1: the organizational strategy to recover a healthy structure.
  • Phase 2: additional changes for Sushi moving forward.

We have a clear vision for the future of Sushi. Right now, the current AMM space seems to be quite divided with Curve taking up the number 1 spot for stableswaps, Uniswap for main trading pairs such as ETH/USDC, and Sushi taking a strong lead in the alt/blue chips race. We will turn this strength into a solid business case, becoming the “decentralized Binance”.

Phase 0: Financial strategy

The SushiDAO Treasury multisig has 10M SUSHI available and sends funds periodically to the Ops treasury. A 10% of total SUSHI emissions are redirected towards the Treasury. Right now, this means: 200k SUSHI out, 60K SUSHI in every month, for a total loss of 140K /mo. This is also a huge blocker for any kind of future expansion. On top of that, emissions are reaching the limit: 241M SUSHI minted out of the total 250M hard cap. Not sustainable at all.

We propose to deprecate xSUSHI and relocate this revenue towards the SushiDAO. With these funds, Sushi will achieve financial health, will be able to grow the team, create a Sushi ecosystem fund and overall have enough money to scale the business.

The original idea behind the xSUSHI model was to decrease selling pressure and act as a marketing tool for investors. Nonetheless, we believe that the current APY of xSUSHI is serving neither of those goals. xSUSHI is not by itself a sufficient reason for people to hold SUSHI, but it functions as a nice to have for people who are already investing in SUSHI as a protocol instead.

For the past year xSUSHI performance has been hovering around 10% APY, which represents approximately 6-8M SUSHI and translates to a dollar value of about $20-$25M USD at current rates or around $42-$76M USD if we consider the 365 days EMA/MA price.

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A 10% APY is irrelevant in crypto, but having the funds needed to scale the business 10x, is not.

The Kanpai proposal had partially discussed this situation. It was voted on but not implemented. Nonetheless, the 5% of xSUSHI revenue would not be enough to recover full sustainability.

We are aware that this action implies restructuring the current governance system. After deprecating xSUSHI, votes will be issued by SUSHI holders, with the same snapshot dynamics many other protocols use (see Yearn for instance).

Transparency and previsibility

We have also noticed a serious lack of transparency and previsibility on how the two treasuries are being managed:

  • There is no financial roadmap.
  • There is no public information on the real budget and expenses of the Ops treasury.
  • Transfers from the multisig to the Ops treasury are not reported to the community in any way.

We strongly believe that a precise financial roadmap is absolutely necessary to enable the desired sustainability. Moreover, transparency with the community is a fundamental pillar that should be restored as soon as possible.

Treasury diversification

Right now, the treasury is composed of almost 100% SUSHI tokens. Even though this approach seems aligned with the protocol’s interest, it really isn’t, as it poses an unnecessary risk for the whole organization. In a prolonged bear market scenario, Sushi might be forced to sell their own tokens cheaply, making the situation even worse for everyone.

This was already discussed on the forum several times, but never implemented (see for instance the Kanpai proposal).

With a financial roadmap in place, it will be much easier to diversify the treasury in a healthy way. This is essential for the long term goals of the protocol.

Phase 1: Team Rescue/Restructure

After all the controversies that were made public over the past few months, the protocol has been gutted from a lot of talent. The first goal should be to retain the present team members. We believe that devs are the core of every protocol and thus, we will ensure the continuity of people developing Sushi. Only after achieving this, will we focus on regaining the lost power.

Recruitment and on-boarding processes will have to be implemented. We will provide two senior PM/Ops profiles that will take care of this, plus all other non-technical matters. Devs should not be required to take care of administrative stuff, as it happens today.

We have the capacity to deploy a team of high quality senior developers that will double the size of Sushi’s tech team overnight. This will help push the technical changes right away and smooth the transition, as new people join the organization.

In order to scale efficiently, it would be wise to create several working groups, which will be focused on specific tasks. The PMs will initialize these groups by setting a leader, who will be in charge of organizing the rest of the unit.

We are proposing the creation of the following working groups:

  1. Tech group: Both back and frontend devs should be included in this group, since we strongly believe that devs should be mostly focused in coding, without worrying much about any extra noise around them.

  2. Ecosystem Growth group: This team will be focused on providing economic support for projects being built within the ecosystem both pre/post launch and pre/post token-launch. There should exist a continuous communication channel between Sushi and other innovative DeFi protocols. This will help the ecosystem grow as a whole while establishing Sushi as the centerpiece, which is strongly aligned with our vision for Sushi.

    This group will also be in charge of marketing Sushi’s innovative projects which did not achieve the deserved attention, such as Kashi, BentoBox or Shōyu.

  3. Multichain group: This unit should be composed of people who are focused on the specific chains and have a grasp for what the community needs. They have to be on top of what’s happening on each particular blockchain, support the teams building protocols and provide direct access to communication across protocols’ teams. The plan should be to collaborate and increase the number of protocols emerging in these new spaces. The tasks would be similar to those of the Ecosystem Growth group, but specific for sidechains.

    The team will consist of several biz devs, with the Master Of Chains leading the effort

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  4. R&D group: A Research and Development team, to tackle the in and outs of new ideas. They should aim high, towards outpacing the competence and not just chasing them.

Phase 2: Moving forward

In this section we will propose some additional ideas for the protocol moving forward. These should be considered only after achieving the previously described infrastructure.

  • veSUSHI: Among the many Sushi products, Onsen is the only one which is actively minting new SUSHI tokens. This inflation is used to incentivize pools in order to attract liquidity. Right now, the SushiDAO determines in a centralized manner how these incentives are distributed. Not only is this method time consuming, but also extremely inefficient.

    A solution to this problem would be to implement a veSUSHI model similar to what CurveDAO currently uses. This would take the problem of deciding where the incentives go from the SushiDAO to the SUSHI holders, who would be incentivized to lock and vote as they get rewarded with more emissions towards pools where they provided liquidity.

    This idea was already discussed in the forum and voted in shapshot, but was finally not implemented.

    A possible critique to this method is that incentives might be won by the most powerful protocols. In order to control this, specific gauge types could be activated in order to proportionally redirect more emissions towards lower caps and interesting projects which are aligned with the Ecosystem Growth/Multichain ideas.

    Sushi could also profit from this new structure by building an “in house” Convex, which would optimize on the rewards for the liquidity providers. Moreover, these kinds of systems are well known for generating bribing dynamics, which could attract even more liquidity to Sushi.

    As we previously said, deprecating xSUSHI implies that votes for governance would be issued by SUSHI holders. With the introduction of veSUSHI, votes would be issued by the veSUSHI holders. These changes in governance will be addressed.

  • Decentralized Frontend: We believe this measure could be good for Sushi since it makes the system even more decentralized and censorship-resistant. On top of that, it would allow external protocols to integrate Sushi as part of their product, enabling a profitable scenario for both parties. This would also avoid unnecessary forks and would be in line with what the Ecosystem growth and Multichain working groups are trying to achieve. Regulatory pressure / legal liabilities could be eased as well.

  • Expansion to non-EVM networks: This was already considered but not executed for Solana.

Wonderland

Who are we?

Wonderland (again, not Wonderland Finance) is an activist fund with an army of Solidity, UI/UX devs and researchers.

At Wonderland, we invest into projects and strongly commit to them. Our approach consists in joining forces with teams for a certain period of time, we do not take over protocols.

Our last work was with The Keep3r Network, where we:

We are actively improving development standards, by releasing new innovative tools such as our own boilerplate and the solidity mocking library Smock.

Compensation

When we invest into a project, it is because we have trust in it. For this reason, we don’t expect to be paid in fixed USD, but rather in the protocol’s vested token.

We ask for 5M SUSHI strongly tied to performance, such that incentives from both parties are aligned. You can read more on this here.

 
 
Together, we will bring Sushi once again to the top of the DeFi scene. Itadakimasu!

Wonderland

  • In favour of change
  • I like thing as they are

0 voters

3 Likes
Sushi Vesting Merkle Tree Clawback [Temp Check]
#2

Very interesting… good luck

4 Likes
#3

Hello world.

[ I’m not working with sushi anymore ]

That said, I strongly believe you just want to make easy money without really helping.

“We will set this price target at $10 per SUSHI, which is approximately 2.5x at the time of writing”

So, you are asking, 5M Sushi with a target price at $10 ? AT $10 !!!
Is it a joke or is it real ? 1st April was 20 days before.

About your proposition, I think you are not aware that in coming days, Arca and the main contributors are going to publish a STRONG proposal.
They worked since many months to make it ready.
They are ready to create the legal infrastructure and move forward.

The dev team is already good structured, and internal processes are really better than months ago.

So, it’s no for me.

11 Likes
#4

lol points for being creative at least

1 Like
#5

Target price should be higher and then I’d be interested in being in favor.

Minimum $20

1 Like
#6

I would like to see a more detailed approach of how you exactly plan to do things. Can you provide some projections and numbers in regards to % allocations for treasury managements. I would also like to see some ideas of what you see spending for budgets, and how you plan to deploy what Sushi has now with things like a burn rate.

The only clear number stated is how much SUSHI to pay you guys, but would like to see more in line with how Wonderland plans to change specific products, and flaws seen now.

Wonderland does have technical talent but your bizdev skills seem to be unproved, some more business oriented documents would be nice to see such as projections, burn rate, expected revenues, and how you hope to rebalance Sushi’s balance sheet. Per department spending would also give a better idea on priorities, while things can obviously be adjusted seeing more clear numbers would make it easier to see what your plans are

1 Like
#7

You don’t propose a takeover and then ask for token-based compensation.

How many Sushi tokens do you currently own? My guess is near zero.

2 Likes
#8

Interesting and well written proposal.

There are some great points imo like veSushi over xSushi, doubling down on ecosystem partnership for each chain, decentralized frontend, stronger leadership, OPS transparency etc…

There are also some incorrect elements:

Of course treasury management is far from perfect but not sure at which point we had a 1b$ treasury? Maybe when treasury was holding the 6 months vested sushi but they do not represent treasury holdings.

Rewards are determined with the help of gauntlet network, they are updated frequently and not set randomly.

Like Naim said, team have been working these last few months on most problems you described above.
I’m finally starting to feel good vibes at sushi compared to few months ago.

I think we should give more time to the team and all community members that stepped in these last few months to prove that they can save sushi themselves.

If they fail then it will be time for defi wonderland to take over and save sushi but now is not the right time.

Also 5m for a 10$ price target is unreasonable.

4 Likes
#9

“Sometimes a strong, wrong choice is better than no choice at all”

I say we err on the side of radical action & shake things up here, for the potential benefit of all of us.

And certainly not saying there has been “no choice” being made recently — in fact I’m super pumped by the latest updates on Miso & Shoyu v2, more cross chain goodness, Trident etc

But as someone who has built & launched many tech products, I can tell you that there are plenty of awesome products that just never achieve long term success — and conversely, no shortage of shitty products that seem to stick around as profit centers despite being terrible eyesores. And the one difference between the two: sound financial & product roadmapping.

Operational efficiency cannot be overstated, and in classic DAO fashion, we have struggled to maintain long term focused efficiency. The fact that we’ve done as well as we have despite these challenges is a real testament to how amazing the Sushi ecosystem is.

I am a huge fan of these products & a long term hodler. And I think this proposal — while admittedly out of nowhere — hits the exact right note of financial/operational efficiency while still maintaining (what I believe to be) Sushi’s ultimate secret sauce: a commitment to truly decentralized access to our ecosystem.

Too many financial/legal concepts revolve around a flight to the VC safety of regulatory security, compromises that inevitably lead to IP blacklisting & “optional” KYC rails that kill the entire ethos of what it means to build decentralized products.

Here’s hoping we can all just take a breath & make this big pivot towards solving the core issues that have plagued us for so long, and finally set free the full potential of what we all know this ecosystem is truly capable of.

4 Likes
#10

To my understanding this proposal aim to fix many issues within sushi such as revenue, lack of leadership, process, lack of company shelling, hiring, execution etc … plus ship some features like ve, gauge, decentralised frontends

If you could deliver on that, its true the protocol would be in a better shape. Things are moving already though and internal work on some issues is ongoing.

Question is then, is it worth 5M sushi? How does a price vesting for 2/3 of the payout - interesting but imo has nothing to do with delivery - work out. I get its hard to find another way to assess work has been done but I wouldn’t back that.

Also lack vision about the road forward for sushi, seems to be mainly reordering of the ship, but as you mentioned no takeover that makes sense

Thanks for the proposal. I have mix feelings about it, price vesting doesn’t cut it imo.
Subjective opinion, open to debate

5 Likes
#11

This proposal would be a 5m sushi outlay for a short term governance fix-up commitment by the Wonderland team.

I have recently met & started collaborating with the current team over the last few months to plan the road ahead. I am of the belief that the present sushi team is finishing the clean-up of the mess left by the failed FN merger (+ prior dysfunction) & are now in a position to make sustained, long term, unencumbered progress.

Nothing against the Wonderland team but I think the present team has demonstrated the resolve to work without pay, through obstacles…& will have a transformational plan they release outlining the road ahead for sushi2.0

6 Likes
#12

I am not entirely sure what Wonderland will be directly doing to ask for a potential $50 million dollars? 5m SUSHI is about 3% of the circulating supply now.

Proposing a tokenomics change + new ideas and deploying developers is not worth 50 million dollars.

Perhaps you could clarify more on what Wonderland’s actual actions are to justify that number.

5 Likes
#13

I can build the same thing (veSUSHI + decentralized governance + decentralized frontend) for 0.333M SUSHI
Actually I’m building a similar thing on zkSync but sushi is like my hometown for me so if the community is in need of it…

11 Likes
#14

The reorg and strategy part looks on point. VeSushi could be beneficial as well.

However, I would also like to see more stress on the product side. Would be good if Wonderland committed to ship Trident and propose concrete follow ups on research side.

Moreover, we should find other metrics than price (ex. relative volumes wrt Uniswap in the next quarters).

#15

Hi, thanks for the proposal. Let me just say:

  • Let’s give the current team some time to get things going and get the project on track. There has been a lot of turmoil with the leadership changes last year and the failed merger with Dani. You can’t expect to see tangible results within a few months which had to be used to clean up the mess. Considering this, I think it would be counterproductive to have yet another shake up.

  • How is this worth $50M?? I know this is crypto, but let’s be reasonable here. You are proposing some changes in tokenomics (which is just following current curve wars narrative, nothing innovative), do a org restructure, and supply two PMs? Sushi can hire the best two PMs in the world for a lot less than 50M

Clear no from my side, sorry

3 Likes
#16

That you, Ondo?

Your honeyed words pave such a sunshine and rainbow scenery, that you should just build your own project and show us all how it’s done, eh. In that way you’ll get as much vested tokens as you would want.

So I counter-propose for you to do just that.

Sushi may have been stumbling for some time, and if it will have to wither and succumb to oblivion - it will do so on its own, under the weight of decisions taken. But that would be the legacy and responsibility of our community. There is no wonder in this land.

No further attempts of taking over the protocol will be tolerated.

2 Likes
#17

This appears to be a solid, well-intentioned proposal. I tip my hat to Wonderland for actually developing a serious proposal. Something we didn’t experience with the Frog Nation or Ondo Finance.

The seriousness and formality of the proposal does give me greater confidence in your abilities to achieve what you claim to be capable of achieving.

In Phase 0, there are many statements with which I agree. Certainly, we probably need a financial roadmap. If there is one already in existence, it is not easy to find and this goes to transparency. Definitely agree we need to know value of treasury and how funds are being allocated. Much can be improved with what you are pitching in Phase 0.

In Phase 1, your ideas are encouraging. However, I believe that any additions to the Ecosystem Growth group should include a majority of xSushi holders/community members. We should be hiring from within the existing ecosystem of those committed to the success of the ecosystem. Hire them, pay them, use their specialized knowledge, network, and experience. Supplement those existing members with others from Wonderland who may have some additional specialized knowledge or experience.

A similar approach should be used for the tech group and multi-chain group. With this approach, we incentivize existing community members/employees/core devs to collaborate successfully with Wonderland.

In Phase 2, there are similarities to Phase 0. Improvement on tokenomics, financial health, and financial management. All of which we probably need to improve. I am not our resident economist, so I will allow those with greater knowledge on these issues, to opine.

With regard to compensation, this needs significant attention and negotiation. A one year lockup period is particularly concerning for such a significant ask. Assuming the amount is agreed upon, I would expect a graduated compensation package. Installment payments with longer lock up periods to make sure a team has a long term interest in the success of the project.

I would also like to see these time-vested tokens stretched out over more than a 1 year. Again, assuming 5M sushi is agree upon, I would much rather see that broken up into a multi-year agreement with being distributed at the rate of 1M sushi per year and locked for an additional year. How you spend your sushi after the first installment becomes unlocked with give us an idea of your commitment to the project. Their should also be more than one price target. $10 sounds good, but I don’t want to see a team jump ship immediately afterwards. Multiple price targets should be considered with bonuses distributed when reached.

Anyway, these are just some immediate, high-level thoughts. It is a thorough proposal and appears to be worth considering in greater depth. The compensation requires rethinking. It is a significant sum of money at current levels and an exceptional amount of compensation at a target level of $10 SUSHI.

6 Likes
#18

Hey Naim,

We believe this defensive and not-welcoming attitude is one of the main issues with Sushi at the moment. Sushi was supposed to be a model for decentralization and community driven organizations, unfortunately it’s not the case anymore. We’ve been received with open arms by the community but with hostility by team and former team members.
If we want Sushi to progress, we should all be collaborating and that was (and still is) our intention. We reached out to the devs, worked on ideas and a roadmap together, but at some point everyone went silent. We shared our proposal from day 1 and continued sharing its iterations until the day we decided to make it public for the community to participate.

We then figured out that a different proposal was being crafted, in a non-collaborative and secretive way. I don’t see the point in keeping it closed when we could all be building together towards a better org.

About your main point, which seems to be compensation: We tried discussing it with the team but unfortunately everyone was unresponsive. Now that it’s public, we gathered feedback from discord, twitter and this forum and came up with this new comp proposal: Wonderland Compensation Mechanics 2 - HackMD

We’re open for discussion about comp and every other aspect of this proposal.

We’re invested in Sushi and will keep pushing towards a collaborative and decentralized protocol.

Happy to keep iterating with your, and everyone else’s constructive feedback.

3 Likes
#19

Thanks for your constructive feedback, we gathered a few comments from TW, Discord and this forum and came up with this new proposal:

Feel free to keep shooting feedback at us, we’ll be happy to keep iterating.

2 Likes
#20

Hi! I know we already answered this question in Discord but happy to do it again publicly.

We currently hold around 400k SUSHI that we DCA’d with 400 ETH. Target is 1m SUSHI soon.

We always invest in protocols we collaborate with and if the community votes us in, we stay for the long term.

We ask for comp in the protocol’s tokens because that aligns incentives pretty well. Also, we never take over projects, we partner up with teams and help them straighten the ship.

Thanks!

3 Likes