“Vampire mining attack” was proposed in a recently published article by Martin Krung, a cryptocurrency analyst from Switzerland. The concept is that all protocols that rely on liquidity will inevitably suffer from “vampire mining attacks.” Just like SushiSwap’s calculation of Uniswap, because SushiSwap has mobile mining and Uniswap does not, in order to pursue the highest profit, large Most liquidity providers will choose to transfer liquidity to SushiSwap (assuming the same contract risk), and Uniswap will eventually decline due to liquidity being sucked up.
Last week, the decentralized cryptocurrency trading platform Uniswap was miserable. If measured by cryptocurrency standards, this dramatic event will also make you feel uneasy. Uniswap’s nearly $1 billion worth of funds migrated to its new competitor, SushiSwap, and a new era was born in community-led exchanges.
This may be the first hostile acquisition in the field of decentralized finance. The most surprising thing is that it has a happy ending. The events of the past week also pushed a person to the forefront. The 28-year-old SBF is the head of quantitative trading startup Alameda Research and centralized derivatives trading platform FTX. He became the savior of SushiSwap; he was the superstar hero who saved the DeFi world, safely escorting users’ funds from Uniswap to the new exchange, and then returning control of the project to the community.
In this way, SBF may change the development direction of the DeFi industry worth 8 billion US dollars.
The SushiSwap project was created by an anonymous team two weeks ago and is “an evolution of Uniswap”. They forked, or copied, the code of Uniswap, and added community-oriented functions. The most important thing is a token SUSHI, which is used to reward liquidity providers (LPs) and remove them from Uniswap. Attracted.
SushiSwap encourages LPs to deposit their Uniswap tokens to Uniswap (on behalf of them to deposit in DEX) in exchange for SUSHI. The plan will exchange Uniswap LP tokens for underlying assets, so that Uniswap’s liquidity will become SushiSwap’s liquidity. In the days before the SushiSwap migration, more than half of Uniswap LP tokens were deposited into SushiSwap’s pre-migration process.
But before this new company completed the liquidity of Uniswap by sucking up Uniswap, there was a dive in the crypto market.
SushiSwap founder Nomi lost his mind and cashed in tokens worth about $14 million. His behavior was interpreted by many as an exit scam. This move cast a shadow on the just starting community, plunged the project into chaos, and the price of SUSHI plummeted.
“Chef’s Kiss”
In the uproar caused by the cash out, Nomi immediately made an unexpected move: he transferred control of the project to the SBF, which has always been his loyal critic.
SBF participated in the launch of SushiSwap on FTX. By executing some clever transactions, it attracted the admiration of the community and put forward some opinions on this project on Twitter.
“Altruist”
SBF soon realized that if no one did anything, SUSHI would die. This project requires a trustworthy and technically experienced person to complete the migration; a person who understands SushiSwap and its background, and a person who is willing to accept the challenge. SBF resolutely accepted this huge task, because no one is really qualified to complete this task.
And SBF is famous for taking over a new, slightly larger random project. Looking back, Sushi seemed to hand it over to SBF naturally.
Ivy from Stanford
SBF is not a decentralized medley. His career started in the traditional finance industry. His parents were law professors at Stanford University. He was born and raised in the Bay Area and took the risk of going east to MIT to study physics, but quickly concluded that the academic world is not suitable he. Instead, he joined a quantitative trading company, where he first encountered cryptocurrency.
It is precisely the desire for “altruism” that SBF insists on the positive impact of wealth accumulation on the world and turns to finance as a business. SBF is a passionate vegetarian. He hopes that the wealth he creates can help and develop a career that can make him truly useful.
In view of this, in 2017, with his savings and borrowed funds from relatives and friends, he recruited former MIT classmates and Wall Street contemporaries, and left and founded Alameda. Alameda is a quantitative encryption trading company and liquidity provider, using quantitative analysis to manage more than 100 million US dollars of digital assets, and operating in major markets and exchanges.
Alameda is named after the California county where SBF lived at the time. But soon after the project started, he moved Alameda’s office to Hong Kong to get closer to the Asian market. For SBF, the founder of Alameda, the early days were a steep learning curve. He needs to learn to handle wire transfers, banking regulations, compliance, exchange restrictions, and other tiny operations that plague crypto transactions, so that it is easy to compare crypto transactions. On the basis of success, SBF has established a customer network in the cryptocurrency and financial fields, and launched FTX in the spring of 2019. His company has become the core of the emerging DeFi field.
But it is SushiSwap that really made him famous.
“Vampire Strikes”
With the Sushi project basically abandoned, SBF accepted the challenge.
He launched a vampire mining attack to migrate user funds from Uniswap to Sushiswap.
It took 6 hours and was completed on Wednesday. During the entire operation, SBF was tweeting and he was hailed as a hero. SBF is such a prolific Twitter master that he was also accused of having a copywriting team locked on Twitter. In the end, SBF returned control of SushiSwap to the community and invited them to select 9 highly respected “multisig” users as a group (including himself) to approve changes and spending.
The new DEX is already online and very active. What makes SBF excited is that 0xMaki (aka Maki), an anonymous full-stack engineer who launched SushiSwap with Nomi, offered to participate in the project and let Sushi start again.
The future of SushiSwap
The currently approved project plans include a more user-friendly user interface, integration with other DeFi protocols (such as RenBTC), and features that are different from UniSwap. SushiSwap can even be launched on blockchains other than Ethereum in the future. But there are still many challenges.
SBF said: “The question now is whether Sushi will continue to grow, whether it will become larger, or whether it will focus on what it is doing now.” SBF is also worried that the actions of the founders of Sushi will affect the reputation of DEX soon after its establishment. Cause irreparable damage.
In view of its strange development curve, it almost fell all the way and then rebounded somewhat. In the public narrative surrounding it, it is not entirely clear which arc will win. Some conspiracy theorists believe that Chef Nomi is SBF. SBF denies this accusation, “I don’t know who Nomi is. My guess is that it may not be anyone who has been rumored.”
Chef Nomi’s Surrender
Last Friday, the legend of SushiSwap took another unexpected turn. Chef Nomi repented and returned the $14 million he had cashed.
The news of the repurchase is in line with the chef’s return of the $14 million in coins. This is no doubt because SUSHI has been questioned because of the chef’s cash-out. No matter what motive the chef returned the money, it is considered a good thing for the project, at least the person who treats sushi as a liar project. It will be less.
Why SushiSwap is important
In general, SushiSwap has caused considerable controversy. About cloning projects, centralized and decentralized control, as well as the competitive incentives provided by farming income, and the art of using capital to earn financial returns, DeFi is so popular. One of the main reasons.
Unlike a group of untested and anonymous developers, SushiSwap needs a group of people with experience in traditional finance and centralized trading to achieve its goals. This is the entity that DEXs want to replace. If SushiSwap succeeds, it may even convince people of the argument: At least for a period of time, a certain degree of centralized and innovative DeFi platform is valuable.
Given that there are so many different tribes in encryption technology, it is difficult to think of who else will have the necessary relationships, soft power and technical capabilities to complete the safe migration of SushiSwap. After migrating and multisig, now looking at the Maki and Sushi communities, we can’t wait to know what will happen.
SBF may be a relatively newbie in the DeFi world, but he is no stranger. FTX has launched about 35 DeFi tokens, and he knows this field well. And he is interested in further development. The Serum project of FTX and Solana is a highly anticipated, non-custodial DEX cooperation project. Solana is a blockchain platform, which is characterized by low transaction fees, ultra-fast processing speed, and can interoperate with other platforms including Ethereum. This gives Serum a clear advantage over other DEXs (such as Balancer and Uniswap), and positions Solana as a potential challenger for Ethereum, becoming the blockchain standard for DeFi.
This vegetarian “vampire miner” may have more surprises hidden in the cuffs of altruism.
