Primer: Brad Nickel from Mission: DeFi podcast interviews 0xMaki, the cofounder of Sushiswap. Learn more about the Sushiswap style of decentralised leadership and how their active engagement with their community makes the whole organisation very adaptable and highly motivated.

Co-founder of Sushiswap - Maki

Who is Maki?

• Is a crypto native and had always been passionate about crypto
• Explored Ethereum when gas was exceptionally cheap and started going into the DeFi space

• Started with dYdX and is a power user of Ethereum and DeFi since day 1
• Wanted to contribute in some ways to the space
• Started with Yearn and wanted to get involved with Uniswap but the Uniswap team is quite inaccessible
• Moved on to Sushiswap and grew the team from 4 to 22 people

"What are our objectives and goals? We listed them all up in the 2021 medium article, which was our roadmap for the year. Right? And you know, like, you would pull up this list, and you would literally be able to checkmark everything on it, I think 85% right now, this is like the year is not even over, right? We're just halfway there. Yeah. And that, to me is fucking insane." - Maki

Staying Anon

• He works in finance and that's all that he will share
• He never talks about crypto but okay to share the gospel of crypto in general
• Initially, at the beginning of Sushiswap, the other two co-founders, Chef Nomi and sushiswap, are fully anonymous and are reluctant to reveal anything about themselves
• But it was hard to get the trust of audit firms like this, so someone had to put some skin in the game - that would be Maki
• He regretted it because he had to put his reputation on the line

Chef Nomi removed some $13 million in funds from a pool in Uniswap meant for Sushiswap and people thought that he had absconded off the funds. Chef Nomi later gave control of Sushiswap to Sam Bankman-Fried - the head of cryptocurrencies derivatives trading firm Alameda Research. A few days later, Chef Nomi returned the liquidated funds to the pool and apologized.

• Thankfully it turned out well and they are able to come back from the mistake but he felt very stupid
• Had to work with people that you can trust and not dox yourself