SUSHI Price Spikes 20% After SushiSwap CTO Quits Following Infighting

Joseph Delong, CTO of the popular SushiSwap DEX, announced his resignation on December 9. He stated that it was in the interest of the Sushi community that he has decided to throw in the towel following a lot of infighting.

“The chaos that is occurring now is unlikely to result in a resolution that will leave the DAO as much more of a shadow than it once was without a radical structural transformation.”

In the interest of the Sushi Community I am resigning as CTO effective immediately. I very much enjoyed the things that we built together and will look back positively on this moment. pic.twitter.com/7pZsQuPgup

— Joseph Delong (@josephdelong) December 8, 2021

SushiSwap Squabbles Continue

There has been a lot of squabbling within the higher ranks of the Sushi community, with allegations from some members that key developer 0xMaki was forced out.

In November, a leaked screenshot showed a poll from Delong asking whether Maki should leave the core team and take an advisory role.

Delong has refuted claims that Maki was dismissed and threatened to quit if the community did not support the current core team. That threat has now been enacted upon leaving SushiSwap, which recently announced its own NFT and metaverse platform, in somewhat of a limbo. The project was supposed to be governed by a DAO, but in reality, a handful of whales hold most of the governance tokens.

Delong also submitted a proposal to pay core members 200,000 SUSHI tokens (around a million dollars’ worth at the time) each, but this did not pass the vote, much to his frustration.

There have been repeated accusations of self-enrichment and extravagant spending without community oversight or governance voting. On December 5, Delong tweeted a long thread addressing what he called “absurd defamation.”

Another proposal has been submitted to restructure the DAO. The proposal, which is still under consideration, suggests setting up a more formalized entity to manage the project and more transparency for the spending of funds.

Aaron Brown, a crypto investor who writes for Bloomberg Opinion, commented that “The infighting at SushiSwap demonstrates that decentralized organizations don’t always work any better than centralized organizations,” before adding:

“The two basic problems with SushiSwap are too many opportunists in its initial creation and failure to align incentives carefully.”

SUSHI Prices Pump … and Dump

The move seems to have gained the approval of SUSHI traders as token prices pumped as much as 20% over the past few hours.

According to CoinGecko, SUSHI is currently trading at $6.27 after spiking to $6.82 a few hours ago from an intraday low of $5.69.

SUSHI has been hit hard over the past month of infighting, having lost nearly 50% of its value in the past 30 days. It is currently down 73% from its March 13 all-time high of $23.38.

It’s also worth noting that SushiSwap’s MISO token platform was exploited for $3 million in mid-September.