A DAO restructuring proposal for SushiSwap will likely pass governance voting, despite heavy criticism from the community.
SMSP-0 comes out on top
A week ago, SushiSwap launched a temp check governance vote via Snapshot to evaluate how to proceed with the DEXes impending leadership crisis. At the time of writing, SUSHI holders overwhelmingly favor a DAO restructuring proposal termed SMSP-0, which was co-authored by Alex Woodard, Research Analyst at Arca, and Daniele Sesta, founder of Frog Nation DAO.
It is however speculated that the vote is swayed by Arca’s and Frog Nation’s wallets. Out of 6.7 million SUSHI that have voted in favor of SMSP-0, 5.7 million SUSHI come from the top two wallets that have cast their vote so far. The second proposal on the list, which calls for the election of an interim CEO, has received 0.68 million SUSHI in votes.
SMSP-0 seeks the creation of separate teams for each of SushiSwap’s products with three leading executives at the top, who are the sole controllers of Sushi’s multisig wallets. According to the proposal, Daniele Sesta should take the role of Head Strategist in this triumvirate and Matthew Lilley would become Head of Engineering. Earlier this month, Lilley was nominated as interim CTO via governance vote, as a replacement for Joseph Delong.
The conspiracy plot thickens
The most controversial cast would be Omakase, who is set to become Head of Operations and Business Development if SMSP-0 should be implemented. Omakase is one of the four members of the ominous developer group that goes by the acronym JOKR, which played a major role in SushiSwap’s leadership crisis.
Meanwhile, further allegations were raised against Omakase. A forum user, who goes by the name Rainbowpuffpuff, accuses him of stealing money from one of SushiSwap’s multisig wallets. Leaked documents from a private chat session show that some of the inside devs decided to compensate Omakase after he lost more than 100,000 xSUSHI in the CREAM Finance hack, without asking the community or governance for consent.
While a poll under Rainbowpuffpuff’s forum thread suggests that 59% of the forum users are in favor of firing Omakase, a poll in a more neutral-toned thread shows that 60% of the users still trust him as a leader. Omakase called the allegations “categorically false and quite frankly irresponsible”:
Stealing money from company is absurd considering there is no company and no funds have ever been misappropriated out of the very decentralized nature of a multisig process.
Hostile takeover of SushiSwap?
Another point that is being criticised by the community is the addition of Daniele Sesta as one member of the triumvirate that is set to lead SushiSwap. Forum users suggest that Sesta might have a conflict of interest, since there are competitors to SushiSwap within the Frog Nation ecosystem.
Responses to SMSP-0 were overwhelmingly negative, some even calling the proposal a “hostile takeover”. One of the users, who goes by the handle Wolfr, added:
At this point, it doesn’t matter at all what this forum thinks or wants, as the community (apparently) doesn’t have access to enough capital to prevent this from passing. This is where DAOs fall apart. When you get activist investors who decide to put up their 8 to 9-figure war chests to create a proposal, there’s very little that can be done to stop it.
SMSP-0 is still to be confirmed by an implementation vote. So far, it is unclear whether the initiators of the proposal are going to proceed with the restructuring of SushiSwap, or try to make amends to the community.
