Clearing 2.5 million SUSHI, Sushi founder says he will focus on technology development

Overview

• Chef Nomi traded his SUSHI for $10 million worth of ETH.

• The SushiSwap founder says this is not an exit scam.

• Instead, he compared himself to Litecoin founder Charlie Lee, who sold all his Litecoin holdings in 2017.

The mysterious Chef Nomi, founder of Sushiswap — the latest protocol to boom in this summer’s DeFi craze — has cashed out.

Over the weekend, the self-proclaimed Sushiswap “chef” withdrew approximately 2.5 million SUSHI from the decentralized exchange in exchange for approximately $10 million worth of ETH (18,000).

The complete record can be found on Etherscan. Recently, the founder of SushiSwap has been criticized for controlling nearly half of SUSHI. He said that these tokens are used for subsequent project development.

On Tuesday, a Twitter account named Sasa said that Chef Nomi had $27 million worth of SUSHI "which will be put into the SUSHI/ETH pool at any time," which was somewhat prophetic.

Since Chef Nomi removed this token liquidity — in other words, reducing the amount of SUSHI available to trade for ETH on SushiSwap — the price of SUSHI has more than halved in the past 24 hours, from $5 to $1.65 at press time.

This is another blow to SUSHI prices, which have been sluggish this week. On Tuesday, SUSHI prices reached a high of $10.81 but have been falling since then, just like the rest of the crypto market.

Chef Nomi explained on Twitter that he liquidated all his SUSHI because he cared about the community and wanted to hand over related matters to other developers. He said that for this, he only got "blame and FUD (panic)."

“I’m no longer concerned with price, I’m going to focus on the technical details of the migration.”

“I wrote the migration code. I did all the audits. I coordinated the largest LP (liquidity provider) pool. I created a big community. More than 100 LP scam projects were born because of me. All this happened in one week.”

Despite the criticism, Chef Nomi said he has not revealed his true identity and whereabouts, and he claims this is not an exit scam. “I’m still here,” he wrote.

Instead, he compared himself to Litecoin founder Charlie Lee, who famously sold all of his LTC holdings at the height of the crypto bubble in late 2017.

Chef Nomi says:

“People ask me if this is an exit scam. Of course not. I’m still here. I’ll continue to participate in discussions. I’ll continue to contribute to the technical side. I’ll help make sure our migration is successful. Charlie Lee did just that, and Litecoin is alive and well.”

SushiSwap’s general manager said that despite skepticism, the project is still under development and that the “code speaks for itself.”