by Naïm Boubziz, Former core @sushiswap

1. The controversial proposal

According to Sushiswap, the current state of the treasury would allow them to “survive” for around 1.5 years ( isn’t so bad , no? ) , which would take us to mid-2024.

To overcome this so-called urgent problem and increase the budget, they have issued the proposal to redirect 100% of the profits generated by xSushi to the treasury, leaving no less than 17,000 holders on the line.

Still according to Jared Grey, the CEO, the budget **strictly** necessary to sustain sushiswap is $5.2M per year.

The reality is quite different.I raised and put on the table the main problem: salaries.

Here are the salaries:

Jared Grey, the current CEO, and Matthew Lilley, the CTO, are paid $500,000/year.The second group, remunerated at $400,000 / year, is composed of:

The rest of the team has salaries < $250,000 / year.

Having high salaries is not a problem when the health of the company is good, or when the market is bullish.

But when the entire ecosystem is in a bear market, when the current situation is not good, when sushiswap’s market share is decreasing day by day in the face of competitors who are generating much more volume, and , above all, that the treasury is no longer able to follow the salaries, it is logically necessary to reduce the blows.

Current salaries represent $4.298M on a budget of $5.2M, which represents 82.65% of the treasury !

Leaving no room for maneuver, for the marketing budget, for business development or even for the legal costs generated by possible legal proceedings.

The community has therefore logically been recalcitrant to this idea, whether on their forum, on their discord or on Twitter.

2. The result of the vote

The vote on this proposal therefore took place from December 12 to December 19.And the least we can say is that it says a lot about:

More surprisingly, no less than 215 addresses having voted “yes” actually belong to the same users.

The final result is therefore 58.95% in favor and 40.98% against.

The first particularity of this result is that two wallets alone represent 90% of all “yes”:

Without these two institutional investors, the people who voted in favor of this proposal would only represent… 11.76%!!!It is therefore the institutional investors who influenced this vote in such a way as to support the CEO in his choices.Let us remember all the same that it is also for him that they had voted during the election.

But what more does that tell us?

Well, that there is a clear break between the community, on the one hand, and the Sushi team (accompanied by their institutional associates) on the other hand.

The second feature of this result is that 215 addresses, or 40% of all people who voted “yes”, actually come from the same addresses.

As proof, here is a list of addresses actually belonging to one and the same user “daciv.eth”, who used Disperse.app to dispatch xSushi (from 0.01 to 0.2 per address):

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x6a787854689fc2da005cc34ed824d3170c983b1550b0b350ab5e63af12014854

The full list can be accessed here: Google Sheet Link

Finally, what about users with more than 1000 sushi?I raise this question because the CTO said:

https://twitter.com/MatthewLilley/status/1602355560275447808

Here is the result for wallets with ≥1000 SUSHI ( obviously removing GoldenTree, Cumberland and the CTO ) :

3. Conclusion

Everyone will draw the conclusion they want from these data.For my part, it is obvious that Sushi is no longer a real community project, and that they are ready to sacrifice a lot to keep (or increase) their salary, despite the bear market.