Happy Birthday Sushi! The SushiSwap 1st Anniversary Art Contest

5 min readAug 24, 2021

Anon-kun, can you believe Sushi is only 1 year old?!

The last year has been humbling, inspiring and borderline unfathomable. The Sushi ecosystem has expanded and optimized its products at a ridiculous speed, and we’re proud to say that we truly believe that we house the brightest minds of any crypto community.

With such an auspicious anniversary coming up — Aug. 23rd, 26th and 28th could all be argued as Sushi’s birthday, so we’ll just call it Sushi Week — we thought we would do something fun to celebrate, leveraging the twin powers of MISO and Shoyu. Namely, an art contest! Think of it like a party, but instead of balloons and cake there’ll be NFTs and prizes.

Each piece of artwork submitted will have the unique opportunity to launch as a fractional NFT on the MISO launchpad, bringing it to the fore for one of the largest DeFi communities in the Ethereum space.

Details regarding format, prizes, entry requirements and timeline follow.

Send us your anniversary art! 💌

The art contest is a competition wherein you submit your artwork to us, and the community votes on what their favorites are. The most popular piece, as determined by these votes, wins.

More specifically, the contest will follow the following basic steps:

Community artists submit their entries, following the guidelines below
Community members vote on submissions in our Discord
Winners are determined by the most votes at the end of the voting period
Winners get really cool stuff

But now, let’s skip straight to the good stuff!

Launch your NFT exclusively on MISO! 🥣

The Grand Prize

The winning artwork will represent the first birthday of Sushi. As such an important piece of artwork in Sushi’s history, it deserves the VIP treatment. The artist in question will get the opportunity to:

Fractionalize their work as an NFT
Auction off all 888 NFT shards via an IDO on MISO
Have their work potentially featured on Shoyu (depending on launch schedule)

Proceeds from the auction will be split as follows: 70% to the artist, 15% amongst the following nine runners-up artists, 15% amongst xSUSHI holders.

Also, as an added bonus, the winner will receive:

88 SUSHI tokens
A special artist role in our Discord
Access to an exclusive Discord channel

Runner Up Prizes

As mentioned before, the 2nd through 10th runners-up will split 15% of the winning fractional auction amount. In addition, second and third place will get some extra goodies:

2nd place = 50 SUSHI tokens and a potential Shoyu feature (depending on schedule)
3rd place = 25 SUSHI tokens and a potential Shoyu feature (depending on schedule)

All other valid entries to the competition will gain a unique Discord role and gated access to the #nft-alpha Discord channel.

Of course, we will also try and bring a spotlight on as much submitted artwork — and its creators — via our social media channels as we can.

Enter the contest right now

You can submit your artwork to the competition right now by fulfilling the following steps and requirements:

Go to https://contest.samurais.io/ to upload and name your artwork
Post your entry on Twitter and tag @sushiswap with the hashtag #HappyBirthdaySushi

You can submit as many different pieces of art as they like within the timeframe, as long as they each fit the submission requirements.

Submission Requirements

In order to be a valid submission the artwork:

Must have a sushi-related theme, or connected to sushi in some way
Cannot be offered for sale during the duration of the contest
Cannot be NSFW, or include hate speech etc.
Must be your own creation

Outside that, go wild! All types of artwork are welcome: 3D, videos, GIFs, photos, memes, copies of physical drawings, you name it! If you need inspiration, feel free to use our existing brand assets.

How do I vote for artwork I like?

This is a simple two-step process:

Hold at least 5 SUSHI/xSUSHI tokens in your wallet
Go to #bot-commands in our Discord and type !join to authenticate. Once you successfully authenticate, you should see a ‘Hodler’ badge on your profile
Head to the #contest-gallery channel
Vote on your favorite entries by clicking the Shoyu emoji underneath them

What are the dates?

The dates are as follows:

Submission window = now (23rd Aug) -> 6th Sep, 8 PM UTC
Voting window = now (23rd Aug) -> 9th Sep, 8 PM UTC
Winners announced = 10th Sep, 8 PM UTC
Winner fractional IDO = 20th Sep, 8 PM UTC -> 22 Sep, 8 PM UTC

We are all very excited to see what absurdity and amazingness you come up with. This is going to be special.

Ready, set… go!

If you still have questions, do not fear. You can ask us anything you like either:

At #contest-chat in our Discord
Tweet/DM @twtmrk, @0x_Bella, @0xUnagi on Twitter
DM @Mark#7654, 0x_Bella#6149, @Unagi#4953 on Discord

Sushi is building a comprehensive DeFi ecosystem with AMM, leverage & margin trading platform, token launchpad and NFT artist platform. Follow our socials to keep up with our product launches and find out more on how you can make the most of your cryptocurrency assets with Sushi’s secure and powerful DeFi tools!