Sushi 2.0: A Restructure For The Road Ahead

28 min readMay 2, 2022

On Monday 2nd of May at 14:00pm UTC we will host a weekly Sushi Forum AMA on Discord, where you'll get a chance to talk to the team before this proposal goes to snapshot later this week.
Update 11th May: The Sushi 2.0 proposal passed on Snapshot with 92% in favor!

Background
Sushi was the darling of 2021, we as a community made a name for ourselves and established Sushi as a central product among our ecosystem. What started as a completely fair launch (90% of tokens released for the public, 10% for treasury), quickly transcended into a team & group of strangers that had no background with each other. We accomplished far more than we set out to in 2021 but the lack of operational efficiency & lack of focused attention towards the long-term was evident in the second half of 2021. Ultimately Sushi took a tumble, major turnover began and both the team and community was left a shell of itself.

What’s happened since the turmoil
With the failed Frog Nation takeover, the remaining team was left to keep Sushi running with major question marks. Community members took the lead to sort out the issues and establish a way forward along with a team motivated to keep Sushi alive. Thereafter, immense change and progress has been made in a short amount of time. Several months have been dedicated to picking up the pieces and working through tough discussions. What came of those trials is a long-term vision for what we believe is a bright future for Sushi and its community.

Product and feature releases during the reorganization:

Organizational progress happening in parallel:

A reorganization was conducted and a strong, loyal team has been retained and installed. Additionally, several new team members have been added.
Rekindled key stakeholder relationships and an external operations advisor has been appointed.
A fair compensation structure has been set-up, proposed, negotiated and completed across all departments.
A legal structure (SushiDAO) has been proposed and recently passed snapshot 22.
Emissions have continually been reduced to current levels, where on average Sushi is generating 3–4x in fees across its networks & protocols relative to sushi emissions.
Monthly spend from Ops has been cut in half from what was averaged during the previous summer and fall.
Prior proposals to introduce stability to the Treasury 6 have been re-hashed, and brought to Snapshot. We’ll be emphasizing a disciplined approach to capital allocation & spend while ensuring requisite funding for innovative product development.

Coming Soon! — Reasons to be excited:

Long term commitments by a comprehensive Sushi team
Executive & leadership search process
Increased transparency to budgets & checks via committee & community oversight
Concentrated liquidity on Trident
Stableswap on Trident
Stargate implementation for Omnichain Token Swaps
Furo Stream & Furo Vesting
Shōyu 2.0 Beta
Kashi Optimizer & Improvements
Adoption of Sushi 2.0 interface

Foreword
This proposal addresses the most practical necessities to deliver a promising future for Sushi, enabling Sushi to operate on a multi year time horizon to deliver value for sushi stakeholders. It is not a stop-gap measure. It is the first of a series of proposals and governance matters required to usher in the next chapter in Sushi. This is the starting point for a fruitful road ahead for all Sushi stakeholders & the Sushi community. The expectation to follow is constant progress, operational excellence, long term value creation, and first rate transparency for Sushi & the community.

In addition to this proposal, the team has collectively worked together on a long term roadmap & vision for what we would like to accomplish for Sushi. The roadmap will be located below, and is separate from the three components that will be a part of the formal proposal to be voted on.

We look forward to everyone working through our proposal, our plan, and the subsequent discussions to follow. The team is highly committed, hungry, and excited to get to work on bringing Sushi back to where it was and well beyond.

私たちを期待してください

An on-going forum proposal has been posted to the Sushi forum. The contents of the roadmap below is separate from what will be voted on in the proposal, but is an extension of the team’s plan & vision for the future of Sushi.

Roadmap & Vision

Our Sushi 2.0 plan is comprehensively broken down into several sections covering many topics such as:

Roadmap Overview
Governance & Community
Treasury Management & Sustainability
Legal Structure
Team Leadership Recruitment

私たちを期待してください

Product Roadmap

Over the last year, Sushi has had a free flowing but slightly unorganized approach to product development. This has had its benefits in the form of new and powerful primitives that were built, but also its cons that come from technical debt and moving to these new systems. The priority for the team will now be centered around fully finishing and integrating these primitives into our stack, and providing an overall permissionless / open system for developers, projects, and users to take advantage of. The three pillars of DeFi are swaps, lending, and launchpads. We now have all of this under one suite, and extending this system with new types of the three primitives will be much easier to do. Tooling will be of the highest priority as well, which includes solid documentation and tools to make life easier for outside developers to take part in the Sushi ecosystem.

Alongside this base system we have built, we have learned a lot of hard lessons over time regarding the peripheral contracts that work with it. This includes things like MasterChef, SushiMaker, xSUSHI, and others that are important to have in a fully-functioning & decentralized system without the need for the team to perform manual actions. Lots of effort has gone into addressing these ideas and we are on the path to cutting out most or all of these centralized points so Sushi can properly scale in a decentralized way.

Integrations are another important part of the product roadmap, and we have several exciting developments in this area. These include: Sushi Guard, our OpenMev implementation to provide a way for users to swap without the fear of being front run or other manipulations that happen in today’s AMM landscape. Stargate and its multi-chain messaging system as another important part of the integrations that we are working on. This will open the door for many possibilities, and enhance the multi-chain initiative we sparked last year. Continued work with the projects & teams that we collaborate with on a regular basis will be important, and we will continue to work closely with these teams that are doing innovative things. Amazing teams: The Graph, Gauntlet, Zapper, Utopia, Certora, Tenderly, Keystone, ImmuneFi, and countless others.

BentoBox
Our vault implementation, and the base of each of our products & frameworks that have been introduced and put into production. Everything is built on top of BentoBox and as more functionality is introduced they will be able to take advantage of Bento’s capabilities that include strategies for putting idle assets to use while earning extra yield for users, and internalizing actions such swaps within Bento that provide major gas-saving incentives.

Strategies at the base are an important part of allowing users to earn more on their assets as they put them to work within our protocol, further development and focus will be on this side of Bento with more capable strategies and offering additional yield for many more tokens.

Trident & Kashi have been built on BentoBox, thus they take advantage of these improvements that come with using Bento as our central vault to put idle assets to work within our products.

For BentoBox to reach its full potential, much is in the works to support increased product development on top of Bento from within the team and outside collaborators. Majority of our developer outreach will be focused on supporting and promoting BentoBox to developers within our space. With included talks, hackathons, and much more planned we believe BentoBox has the potential to be a main infrastructure layer for DeFi akin to AWS and the web.

Trident AMM Framework
Initial release of Trident came at the end of March 2022, and it’s a central part of our vision going forward. Trident was designed as a framework, and is built using a single interface called the IPool interface. This allows us to continue rapid development of unique and new pool types, which can be slotted into the base framework much easier than in the past or compared to other AMM protocols.

Constant product or the well-known 50–50 split of assets is now in production, and has been going through the battle testing phase on Polygon. We will continue to monitor it during this phase, while the release of three new pool types are in the pipeline and will be released alongside constant product pools in the near future. The three new pool types will be in the form of a Stable or like-kind asset pool, a concentrated liquidity style pool, and the third being a multi-asset index style pool.

As Trident is a product framework, we expect and look forward to seeing many more iterations & types of pools to come into play over time. Our routing engine Tines has been designed to keep in mind the flexibility of our framework, and to simplify the process of introducing new pool types that have direct support for swaps as soon as they are pushed into production.

Plans are in place to further upgrade Tines, and improve on the initial design that is in production now. We will continue to work towards a routing engine that works efficiently within our framework, and provides the best price for all swaps on our protocol.

More info on our initial launch and future plans can be found under this medium post.

Kashi Lending & Borrowing Framework
Our isolated lending protocol was introduced almost a year ago, and has been sufficiently battle-tested so far. Due to this, we will be continuing further work on introducing new types of Kashi pairs and further evolving from the initial pair that is in production now.

Kashi’s biggest inhibitor over the last has been primarily due to lack of resources dedicated towards its development, and focus being shifted to other products like Trident. Now, we have plans to unlock its full potential and exciting things are being cooked up to continue to improve on its initial release.

Further improvements include:

An oracle framework to allow for easy onboarding of any oracle provider, and introducing lending and borrowing markets for many more tokens.
Complete rebuild of the UI that has already been completed, and ensures continuity & similar experience to our other products.
Completion of key features, such as TWAP support, which unlocks lending and borrowing against liquidity pairs and various other types of assets within the space.
Integration with limit orders to provide margin leveraged orders or trading. Better tooling to monitor and inform users on market performance, and allow us to A/B test different styles of Kashi configurations.

Alongside the introduction of these new features and base improvements to Kashi, we have plans and have work being done to improve the user experience and introduce easier ways for users to put their assets to work within Kashi.

A main enhancement to this will be in the form of our Kashi Optimizer, that will provide optimized lending rates across multiple isolated markets in one place. Users will then be able to deploy a single asset in exchange for a koToken, and underneath the optimizer will put the tokens to work across multiple markets with the goal of earning user’s a higher and more optimized yield.

Miso Launchpad Framework
Our solution to launching a new token or introducing price discovery for many kinds of assets on release.

Lots of work over the last few months has gone into integrating Miso directly into our main Sushi app, and we now have a better system in place to scale up the completely permissionless framework. Continued work will be done in regards to introducing new forms of recipes, or scripts per se that have unified steps that are taken during an auction and on release of a new token. The auction creation process can then cater to any project’s pre and post-launch plans. Some of these enhancements include:

Gnosis Safe or Minimal Multisig Deployment on launch.
Liquidity Lockups or direct Liquidity Launching to spin up liquidity pairs the moment an auction ends.
Vesting schedule put into place at the end of an auction.
Direct incentive deployment, to establish well incentivized farms for new projects looking to build their liquidity on Sushi from day one.

In the past Miso was gatekept, or required team involvement to help projects launch tokens and provide assistance during the process. Today, Miso is now completely permissionless and anyone has the ability to spin up new auctions at any time. Permissionless Miso has been deployed onto a number of major networks, and is available to use for any project regardless of the chain they decide to launch on.

Decentralized curation or signaling of Miso Auctions is being explored, and we will continue to seek ways we can further improve the experience for users to ensure that they are participating in legitimate auctions.

Peripheral Systems
The glue to ensuring that Sushi is a self-functioning system is of the utmost importance to us. We have plans and work being done to improve on the lessons we’ve learned over the past year. We will introduce improvements that remove central points of failure.

MasterChef for one has been our main incentivization tool, and has done wonders for establishing us as a real contender within the ecosystem. But with it, because of the ease and speed we needed initially to incentivize many different types of liquidity pairs we are inhibited to scale it properly as it should be across all chains. With this, we will be introducing a new permissionless staking and incentive system, so any project can ensure that their liquidity pools are properly incentivized to grow their liquidity requirements without needing to work directly with the Sushi team. This also improves on several of the problems that have been discovered through our various chef contracts, such as rewards running out. This introduces clear guard rails to ensure users are rewarded as displayed on the interface. We believe that Sushi emissions shouldn’t and won’t be heavily relied u[on in the future to introduce new tokens to our protocol. We’ve observed current farms at 2x to believe that this will be the case.

Fee collection from our various protocols is another pain point that we’ve had to deal with in the past. Further work is being done to cut manual operations needed to ensure that xSushi holders are receiving the full benefits of activity that happens within our protocols. Improvements on the SushiMaker contract have already been put in place, and have improved the timeliness of fee delivery but are still not fully self-functioning. Thus, we are looking into and experimenting with a new style of fee collection in the form of SushiMaker Auctions. This is an automated way for fee collection to happen without the involvement of the team. Fees can then be accumulated and anyone can kick off an auction to sell the accrued fees mainly in the form of liquidity positions to the highest bidder of the auction. Automation can then easily be slotted in to ensure multichain bridging of fees, and provide a better experience for xSushi holders.

The SushiBar or xSushi is another contract we will continue to think and iterate on in regards to improving its existence. For one, we think ve-models might not be the best way to go in regards to revamping this structure. Though a type of gauge system is very intriguing and offers a good way for projects and large holders to bribe their way into directing emissions towards their pairs. It requires further emissions & major discussions on the hard cap and total supply of Sushi. A proposal called Kanpai has been released on snapshot, and its primary goal is to move towards a way we can both ensure sustainability of the protocol while also ensuring value is constantly accruing to the sushi token and its holders. We don’t believe a complete scrap of xSushi is the answer to our problems, though we do see it as an opportunity to improve on and ensure that fees are properly directed towards sustainability and value accrual. With that much more discussion and community input/direction will be needed in the short future to decide the way forward for xSushi, veSushi, or something else.

We are still experimenting with products that will unlock more for our users. For example, Furo is one of these products that will be deployed into production relatively soon and will unlock improved token streaming and vesting capabilities. Designed as a framework, with composability and additional feature extension in mind.

We will introduce other additional products to supplement our suite, and are always open to outside collaboration from our community in regards to building fun and innovative features.

Shōyu

The Shōyu team expects to have an open beta available in 8–10 weeks so long as there are no unforeseen complications on the way.

Shōyu 2.0 started development in January of 2022 and was built completely from the ground up. We’re approaching a stage now where we are starting to show what we’ve been building to the community. It’s extremely exciting and we can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on.

Features to be excited about:

Collection and Trait based offer system — This is great if you’ve been thinking of purchasing a Moonbird with a particular trait like ‘Diamond Eyes’ for a specified price.
Add to basket & checkout system including floor sweeping tools — If you plan to purchase multiple NFTs in one transaction then this is for you and so are the gas savings that come with it.
Make a purchase with any combination of tokens in your wallet — All listings are in ETH/WETH and we perform the swap under the hood at the time of sale.
Best NFT indexer and search experience to date — With the help of StreamingFast technology we are building the best NFT indexer on the market. One of the major pain points with current NFT marketplaces is that their search engines are sub-optimal and finding what you want is often met with resistance. We’ve put in systems to make this a problem of the past.
Social features — The social aspect of Shōyu is a completely opt-in system, if you do not wish to make a post about your collected or created artworks then you don’t have to. We do not have comments enabled on the NFT item page on the marketplace. On the other side of that discussion we would love for creators and collectors to build their communities through Shōyu. We are building a system very similar to Twitter where our social features do not interfere with the marketplace but instead bolster and promote it. If that’s not for you, that’s totally okay. For a quick example of what we can do with this; BAYC could make an announcement through Shōyu and only allow BAYC owners to comment on the post.
Email and in-app notifications for purchases, offers, likes and more — When you make a purchase or sale on Shōyu, you can receive a notification via email and/or in-app.

There are more innovative ideas we’re working on at Shōyu and you will hear more about them in the coming weeks. We hope to see you in the beta trying to break everything you can so we can make the changes needed to provide you all with the best product possible.

Integrations
From the start, Sushi has always looked towards collaborating and extending our systems through composability with other innovative projects. We will continue down this path of working with many teams, and integrating with them to improve our products.

Sushi Guard the OpenMev implementation for Sushi is one such integration that is live, and has been worked on extensively over the last couple of months with continued improvement in the pipeline. Sushi Guard will help us tackle the problems that exist in the form of MEV, while also taking advantage of MEV with the introduction of back-running and a rebate system to kickback fees and positive slippage to our users. A current proposal with more info on this is located here on the forum.

Stargate is another such integration that we are very excited about, and we have many ideas being worked through. This will unlock tremendous potential from our multi-chain initiative we have executed on. Multichain will continue to be extended in the future. Easy wins, we will likely see in production in the near future include things like:

BentoBox to BentoBox transfers across chains, with the ultimate goal of providing an easy way for users to deploy assets to the best yielding opportunities.
Cross-chain swaps, will unlock the liquidity that we have built up across various chains with many improvements for the user that come with this experience.
Many ideas will come from this integration, though we don’t want to reveal all of our cards just yet.

In addition to these main integrations we have in the pipeline, we will continue to work closely with all of the teams that we have established connections with over the last year. Important things on the horizon include:

Full migration of our data layer to The Graph’s Network, enabling true decentralization and up-time for our interface.
Working with DAO tooling projects such as Utopia, supporting them with the integration of our products and also helping in any way we can to improve DAO operations and the various nuances that come with it.
Continued use of ImmuneFi and its bounty programs to ensure our protocols and newly deployed features are continuously being poked and prodded by whitehats to help us discover and prevent future exploits.
Continued use of Certora and their formal verification processes to ensure future releases are well tested and have all been formally verified.
We will continue to be good stewards of our ecosystem while giving back and growing the ecosystem as a whole.

Tooling & Documentation
Documentation has been an area we’ve highlighted to improve upon. Complete revamp of our docs page is underway, and better consolidation of information is needed to continue to promote the Open Source nature of our development. Ensuring devs will not have to jump through hoops while attempting to build on and extend our protocols is tremendously important to our ecosystem plans.

Users will also be kept in mind as we work on our revamp. Expect informative guides & blogs to assist users as they discover and use Sushi’s products. We will seek to continue our support for users through the Samurai team and we are confident in their abilities to continue to improve on this experience.

Tooling is another area we’d like to dedicate resources towards, including easy to use cli tools for developers to work with. Improving the development experience for Open Source developers and keeping things simple for advanced users to interact with our protocols is key.

Improved analytics will continue to be thought through along the road ahead. We will work to ensure all users and stakeholders have the ability to source the information they need when making financial decisions. While also improving the transparency in regards to the operations of the protocol, and its journey towards a self-functioning and decentralized future.

Samurai 2.0

Throughout the turmoil that has been since mid-last year, Samurai have acted as community champions and provided round-the-clock support to the Sushi community. The Samurai have cemented their commitment to the Sushi community.

With the recent proposal unanimously voted in, the Samurai team will lead community efforts at Sushi to help shape and boost community engagement. The core mission is to positively impact our community members while building a bridge between the community and team. Samurais will also assist in bi-directional communication with the community resulting in increased feedback, identification of community needs, and community-focused product development.

Sushi provides an authentic touchpoint for several initiatives, making it an essential part of the user experience. By tapping into the insights of active community members, Samurai will be able to help the developers figure out how to deliver the most well-thought-out experience for Sushi. This includes gathering product feedback, assessing product & community sentiment, and much more.

Samurais are committed to constantly evolving to meet our community’s needs and work closely with other teams in Sushi.

We have a range of items lined up to improve all aspects of what we do for the community, so here’s a quick run-through of planned things:

Community Engagement:

Toshokan Blog
Sushi Webinars
Sushi Academy
Samurai NFTs
Samurai-Sushi Merch store

Community Champions:

Open Contributor Engine
Sushi Data Room
Product Metric Templates
Transparency Templates

Customer Support:

Support Engine
Testing sessions
Self-Service Knowledge Base
Samurai Platform
Samurai Onboarding Platform

More information on the future of Samurai’s and their roadmap can be found under this proposal.

Marketing

Sushi has long enjoyed an organic marketing approach without a formal marketing team. As the project grew and products shipped, the lack of a dedicated team to keep up with the need for updates, educational content, awareness activities and partnership/co-marketing efforts was apparent. The past several months our marketing contributors were able to take a grassroots approach and set-up a regular drumbeat of content to bring product awareness, co-marketing efforts and community updates to life. With most of the roadblocks now(e.g. retrieving access to social channels, having a marketing budget allocated, Sushi pay & org structure sorted) we’ll be able to lay a better foundation for Sushi Marketing 2.0.

We have plans to organize a much more structured approach to marketing. Our goal will be to collaborate with the product teams to spread awareness of the whole product suite, the Sushi brand and onboard the next generation of DeFi users by building an educational knowledgebase. We’re expanding our efforts into the following categories:

Product marketing:

Prepare product launches (hype videos, campaigns, cross team coordination)
Push feature updates (communication, monthly newsletters, community updates)
UI & UX research/feedback campaigns (for pre-releases)
Educational campaigns (explainers, tutorials)
Managing contracting parties (for all non in-house work: videos, community artists, partners)
Community engagement campaigns (Contests & other User generated content activities)

Content marketing:

Write explainers and introductions for all products
Technical writing (conduct research & updating docs)
Write use cases (strategies for different target audiences)
Set-up an educational knowledge base to onboard new users (Sushi Academy)

Growth marketing:

Social channels coverage
Promoting governance awareness
Events & community partnerships (facilitating AMAs w/teams, presence at key industry events)
Press/Newsletter/influencers coverage
SEO & Analytics
Partnerships/co-marketing efforts
Set-up a community ambassador program

Channels covered:

Twitter
Discord
Medium
Telegram
Youtube

Marketing coverage across the full product suite:

New releases
Onsen
Tools: Meowshi, Sushi Guard
Trident
Kashi
Legacy: SAKΞ
MISO
BentoBox
Until release: Shoyu*

*Shoyu will need its own dedicated marketer
focused on the NFT market — after release

Marketing will work closely with the dev team, design team, bizdev and samurais to align and collaborate on many of the efforts mentioned above. We’ll also work closely with advisory and the wider team to track progress and flag growing needs that’ll need to be covered in the future. This will be addressed via a proposal (with an outline of needs, KPIs and budget) for review.

Sushi DAO

Governance & Community
Community is a major pillar for the future of Sushi, and thus our commitment to transparency and community involvement will continue. Weekly Forum calls will continue as they are today, and our AMAs will be reestablished for new & exciting projects. Sushi 2.0 will usher in an enhanced commitment to real-time, on-going community updates. Open governance, and the well established forum to snapshot processes will be put into place to ensure that fair governance happens. Governance will continue to be at the forefront of our plans, and we have plans to incorporate the community earlier and often in the discussion & decision making process.

A number of important governance discussions will need to be discussed, planned, and implemented via the community. Pressing topics include:

Whitelisting of new AMM pool types, Kashi pairs, and Miso recipes.
On-chain or snapshot modules to execute txs from the multisig will be introduced over time so that Sushi can start to take its true form of permissionless & self-functioning governance.
Tokenomics & ve model discussions
Ecosystem grants & process
Leadership/executive contributor appointments
Community oversight, checks & balance process. The formation of community councils to ensure all needs of the community are addressed, and the community’s voice continues to be heard & felt.
Treasury management, sustainability & budgetary matters.

Working together proactively with the community positions Sushi favorably in the future of web3, crypto, and DeFi. Sushi is and will continue to be a community owned, community operated, & community governed protocol.

Treasury Management & Sustainability
Sustainability is at the forefront of a lot of our discussions we have been having over the last couple of months. The emissions that fund the DAO will be ending. Thoughtful action needs to be made to ensure the Treasury is well established and diversified.

Kanpai and continued reduction of emissions for incentives are in the works, and we believe this is a way for the Sushi Dao to continue its operation well into the future. Kanpai focuses on the introduction of diverting a portion of fees to the Treasury, and will allow us to improve on sustainability, fund future product development, regardless of the macro environment. Focused emissions are important to improve the profitability of the DAO. We will continue to work to provide an ecosystem that is funding innovation & growth while also profitable to our stakeholders.

Additionally, we believe that Sushi is actually in a very healthy position based on remaining treasury and our recent treasury diversification initiatives. Sushi is currently generating, at a conservative estimate, based on last three months of data roughly $41.04 million a year in revenue that is completely being distributed to xSushi holders. With Kanpai, we have the optionality to further optimize our treasury strategy and effectively invest in future profitable growth of the DAO and its products.

Productionizing, or the introduction of Protocol Owned Liquidity, is something we plan to focus on and will look to further enhance our Treasury by putting the assets it holds to work in a simple but safe way within our own protocols. Kashi Optimizers can be used in the future to put idle stablecoins to work, and generate additional yield for those reserves.

Surplus spending will no longer happen so that expenses & additional services will be kept to a minimum so the team can focus on the long term plan ahead.

Operational transparency is a core focus of our plan for Sushi 2.0. We’ve taken immediate steps for accountability by creating a compensation oversight committee to provide a check for spending matters. This is the first step to a structural overhaul of Sushi. We will be implementing both tracking & reporting systems related to Treasury spend. Loose policies and disbursement of funds will no longer happen. We are ensuring a structural overhaul to ensure that fiscal irresponsibility can not happen within Sushi. On a practical note it is important to the current team embarking on Sushi 2.0 situations like last year do not occur again.

Legal Structure
Establishing a legal structure & entity planning for Sushi is a high priority item for the team. Representatives from various Sushi internal teams have been collaborating over the past several weeks with top crypto law firms & legal scholars from across the world to come up with a plan for Sushi.

We believe that it is of primary importance that Sushi’s decentralized community led ethos persist while also paying attention to sound legal planning that enables us to do so. This approach will allow Sushi to create the maximum value for the greatest number of people.

The structure we are exploring allows for Sushi to be flexible, but ensures there’s an entity that solely operates the treasury on behalf of snapshot community voting. Additionally, various service organizations (dev, ops, etc.) should be able to perform tasks for the broader Sushi ecosystem. We believe that the mindful approach to legal will allow Sushi to exist far into the future.

We are entering the final stages in which we are deciding between entity jurisdictions (Cayman Islands vs Switzerland), and we intend to start the entity formation process in the coming weeks.

This is not a one time task but rather Sushi’s on-going commitment to legal planning which will allow Sushi to evolve far into the future. We will continue to provide updates in the forums, and utilize the governance process to implement these initiatives.

Team

This proposal outlines updated compensation for all Sushi contributors and establishes a budget for future hires, leadership, and strategic/advisory to ensure sushi remains at the forefront of DeFi innovation many years into the future. We will also align the contributors with the community and set up a “compensation committee” to transparently oversee all Sushi operations. All Sushi teams, contributors, and future contributors will fall under the oversight of the compensation committee. Our proposal will retain a comprehensive team across all functional areas & departments (Engineering, Design, Marketing, Biz Dev, Community Engagement, Shōyu, & Operations) to ensure a cohesive team capable of operating the full businesses end to end.

We’ve earmarked a total of 6M $SUSHI to be deployed over the course of the next 4 years to fund, retain, and incentivize long term contributor retention. This provides us funding to secure new contributor talent & leadership. We have established a compensation framework & complimentary budget to incentivize long term value creation & performance for contributors. We’ve also created an accountability system creating a process to objectively evaluate individual contributor performance.

Accountability
We have created a compensation committee to oversee budgets, compensation distribution, and evaluate new hires to undertake Sushi 2.0’s road ahead. We will ensure transparency and accountability toward the Sushi community.

Compensation Committee
The compensation committee will ensure accountability and transparency within the Sushi business & will be bringing all Sushi business under the oversight of the compensation committee. A compensation committee is a step in the right direction for increased community & market confidence in Sushi.

The Compensation Committee will have several main jobs:

Compensation negotiations
Track TWAP and as well as approve the Roadmap based vested Sushi once the Roadmap is complete/or when individual items on the roadmap are complete.
Help with compensation negotiations on future hires Observe the establishment of formal roles & responsibilities.
Negotiate future compensation plans after the outlined ones expire.
Review individual performance evaluations for pathways to contributor promotion, probation, or termination.
Vet, approve, & disclose budget requests.

Initially, we propose Matthew Lilley & Neil sit on this committee as they have all been helping with the restructuring plan, interviewed all current sushi contributors, and have already begun negotiating Sushi contributor contracts.

Of note, we do want to see the compensation committee eventually expand, and expect it to.

Compensation committee will use a simple unanimous voting system for all committee matters.

To determine if roadmap items have been completed in a satisfactory manner & in a reasonable amount of time.
For distribution regarding price oriented incentive targets defined by 30 day TWAP price targets.
For validation of performance reviews.
Similarly, a Compensation committee will also support a unanimous voting system in the event a contributor relationship requires formal termination & offboarding.

Contributor Compensation
Contributor compensation framework will be composed of:

Annual salary in USDC w/ individual performance bonuses for meeting criteria such as: quality & quantity of work done, productivity, direction & ownership, teamwork & culture.
Vested Sushi with a 1 year cliff 4 year total vest.
If a contributor elects to tie most of their total compensation to performance based compensation they may elect a 6 month cliff & 2 year vesting window on their vested Sushi allocation.
Roadmap based Sushi with a strike of completing a community agreed roadmap and 2y vest.
Price based Sushi at a $12 strike, 30 day TWAP, & 2 year vest.
One time signing bonus. 6m cliff.

Any unvested, unallocated sushi that is not paid out to a contributor will be returned back to the Sushi treasury.

Compensation examples:
Designer A: 130,000 USDC annual salary + 90,000 vested $SUSHI w/ 1y cliff 4y vesting.

Note: Designer A has elected to take a compensation package of annual salary & 100% guaranteed 4 yr vested sushi.

Engineer A: 160,000 USDC annual salary + 40,000$SUSHI vested sushi w/ 6m cliff 2y vesting, + 50,000$SUSHI price based sushi @ 12, + 50,000$SUSHI for roadmap completion.

Note: Engineer A has elected to take a compensation package of annual salary & 70% of $SUSHI compensation tied strictly to deliverables: price & roadmap completion. As such, 40,000 $SUSHI will have a shorter vest to offset anyone facing extreme financial risks while exposing themselves to a high degree of performance based compensation.

We are retaining a group of team members with product familiarity, an understanding where Sushi has been and troubles faced, and also a fresh outlook to bring Sushi into the next chapter. Many contributors have been working voluntarily without pay to keep the Sushi project alive. It is now time to create a new culture beginning with great existing talent. We will also endeavor to hire new talent across a variety of roles, responsibilities, and leadership positions.

List of Team Members Retained:

I’m Software — Engineering Team Lead, Compensation Committee
JiroOno — Software Engineer
Sarang — Software Engineer
Chillichelli — Software Engineer
Ross — Software Engineer
Ilya — Software Engineer
CleanUpGuy — Software Engineer
Lufy — Software Engineer
Tangle — Community Manager, Business Development
0xBella — Marketer
Unagi — Marketer
Cabbage — Designer
Kastrye — Designer
Chester LaCroix — Designer
APE — Business Development
Pegbit — Samurai
RSK — Samurai
Maka — Samurai
Trudahmzik — Samurai
Zapacheenie — Samurai
Salman — Shōyu
Masayoshi — Shōyu
H4v1g — Shōyu
fejk/Ryan — Shōyu
Neil — Compensation Committee

Roles we are looking to immediately hire for:
Product manager
Controller
Solidity Dev
UX Designer
BD Associate
Full Stack Dev
Operations
Business & Strategy Analyst
Leadership: CEO, C-SUITE: CxO, Other Executive Leaders

Future hires may be sourced via existing contributors, via self nomination on the forum, or by nomination within the Sushi discord.

Leadership

We are also making an explicit commitment to finding, evaluating, and undertaking a formal leadership search across the entire Sushi organization. We believe that the road ahead is best approached with continuity from the existing team & a commitment to embracing fresh talent, perspectives, and contributors. We believe the earmarked 6M SUSHI provides us ample flexibility to bring in talented executives & leadership.

Sushi will commence a formal leadership & executive talent search. We believe the road ahead includes great executive talent joining Sushi. Over the next 90 days we’ve ideated a process to allow leadership & executive talent to surface and ultimately be appointed via governance vote. The leadership & exec talent candidate pool will be sourced through the community, through the team, through token holders, or through self nomination in Sushi discord & forums. We have a process to vet candidates and allow them to meet various stakeholders (team, investors, engaged community members) and evaluate for a strong mutual fit. Formally undertaking a leadership & executive talent search will allow Sushi to evolve long into the future and is a necessity for any growing organization.

Candidates for leadership may be sourced via existing contributor networks, via self nomination on the forum, or by nomination within the Sushi discord.

Costs
Forecasted compensation costs (retained team + roles to immediately hire for): 5.75m USDC (annual salaries) + 2.3m multi-year vested $SUSHI outlay (1 time) + 2.4m performance incentive $SUSHI (1 time if deliverables are met).

Sushi Org:

Annual salaried budget for retained contributors + roles we are looking to immediately fill: 5,750,000.00 USDC.
Compensation tied to 2 year vested sushi: 1m $SUSHI.
Compensation tied to 4 year vested Sushi: 1.341m $SUSHI
Compensation tied to 1 time “signing bonus”: 115,000 $SUSHI
Performance based compensation (roadmap deliverables &/or price strike): 2m $SUSHI

Projected Salary Spend By Department (retained + immediate future hiring needs)

Engineering: 2,468,000 USDC annual
Design: 624,000 USDC annual
Marketing: 288,000 USDC annual
BD: 430,000 USDC annual
Shoyu: 1,032,000 USDC annual
Samurai: 480,000 USDC annual (from Samurai v2 governance mandate)
Product: 200,000 USDC annual
Advisory: Hourly rate < $100/hr, invoiced on a monthly basis until a subsequent proposal with formal KPIs and advisory compensation is approved by the community.

By providing transparency around present and future costs & spend we will be able to make better financial decisions and thoughtful discipline around the Sushi organization. We are also making a commitment to ongoing financial & operational transparency which we believe will lead to increased stakeholder & market confidence.

Expected Impact on Treasury

Current Treasury Balance:

Expected Inflows to Sushi Treasury from block reward: ~800K SUSHI
Expected Max allocation to current contributors, future hires, and future leadership: 6,000,000 SUSHI

Also with the recent passage of Kanpai, and a conservative estimate of $41.04 million in revenue. The treasury would have $4.1 million in additional inflow.

Though this is a large portion of the treasury, we would argue that there is no better use of the treasury than attracting and retaining talent to contribute to the protocol. Currently Sushi has 4 fully employed developers across the Sushi & Shōyu products. A larger team is needed to build out the full scope of the community’s goals. This plan immediately expands the team to 10 vetted full time software developers across Sushi & Shōyu.

Stability
We believe the retained team & hiring plan represents a cohesive team required to ship a full stack product experience & make durable long term progress. The compensation structure ensures we are able to tie market rate compensation to a multi-year time horizon & reward new value creation. We believe this bottoms up approach provides a newfound stability that the Sushi community is seeking along with long term commitments by the existing team.

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!