$27M of Sushi funds could disappear at the drop of a chef’s hat

Analysis of the smart contracts from hot DeFi protocol SushiSwap has revealed that as much as $27 million worth of the native token is in an admin wallet that could be dumped at any time without warning.

Data analyst and partner at Cinneamhain Ventures, Adam Cochran, took a deep dive into the administrative wallet structure of SushiSwap — a protocol that has gained a lot of traction and $1 billion of liquidity in the past few days.

The analysis of the Uniswap clone emerged from a revelation by Twitter user Sasa that the “deployer wallet” has around $27 million worth of Sushi tokens which could be dumped on the SUSHI/ETH pool.

Cochran said that when he first looked at the smart contract, he assumed that the developer fund was going to a wallet that was locked by a governance vote or time lock.

1/6 As far as I can tell the $SUSHI guys are sitting on $27M USD worth of their own token that could be dumped or used to dump against LP tokens.When I first looked through the contract, I assumed that the dev fund was going to a wallet that was locked by gov vote or timelock. https://t.co/OQZ4QciqXw

— Adam Cochran (@AdamScochran) September 1, 2020

But his analysis revealed that it is actually just a generic wallet that the anonymous SushiSwap administrator, or “Chef Nomi,” as he is known on Twitter, has the cryptographic keys for. This means that investors could potentially be dumped on without warning.

The fintech analyst added that taking $27 million from a project that currently had such a high valuation fully diluted may not be seen as totally unacceptable.

“If Nomi announced that and took even 10% off the table, people would likely be OKwith it.”

 

However, not touching that wallet raises further questions given the Chef clearly realizes the project isn’t worth more than $2 billion and was unlikely to expect token prices to increase any further. They have actually retreated 30% from Tuesday’s ATH.

Giving Chef Nomi the benefit of the doubt, Cochran suggested that it could merely be an oversight in the ecosystem. However he said the funds should be immediately moved to a governance vote locked wallet.

Now that it’s been around a few days, Sushi is already old news, with a new project called “Kimchi,” forking from the protocol, which itself was a fork of Uniswap. Kimchi had reportedly locked in half a billion dollars just hours after launch — though at the time of writing that figure appeared to be $175 million according to the protocol’s own dashboard.

Similar to its sibling Sushi, the platform offers a cut of the trading fees to users who lock their tokens into a time locked smart contract though there is very little other information about it at the time.

Speaking to BNN Bloomberg, Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz suggested the DeFi sector was getting a out of hand, recalling the ICO boom in 2017, and “speculative frenzy” around Tesla.

“There are new projects that are doing really cool things but they are getting such a surge of liquidity so fast, it’s changing at a speed I’ve never seen in markets.”

Novogratz cited the Sushi project adding that the  "irrational exuberance" was slightly concerning and it could be another bubble that is about to burst.