DAOUSDT
DAO Maker / Tether USD
crypto Composite

The [Arbitrum DAO vote](https://snapshot.org/#/s:arbitrumfoundation.eth/proposal/0xb32581468bece42245fa267ea86156a621ae77f61bb866118189b5d50155b051) to release frozen ETH from the rsETH hacker passed.

In September 2020, the founder of SushiSwap sold his entire stake for $14M in ETH and disappeared.
Two days later he came back, returned all of it, and asked the community to decide what he was worth. Then he left for real.
The guy who took over from him was Sam Bankman-Fried.
Read that again. The successor to a guy who just rug-pulled the protocol was the future largest crypto fraudster in history. At that exact moment, Alameda was already farming and dumping SUSHI while SBF was publicly playing savior. We just didn’t know yet. Nansen later confirmed the wallets. By then SBF was in a courtroom.
This is the actual founding story of SushiSwap. Not “anonymous chef forks Uniswap.” The real one.
I think about this whenever I look at the SUSHI chart.
The token peaked at $23 in March 2021. It trades around $0.20 to $0.30 now. TVL went from $8B+ at peak to roughly $40M to $100M depending on the day. Daily volume collapsed from around $915M in late 2022 to about $21M in late 2025. Anyone who staked at $5 has been bleeding for four years. The Dec 2025 emission vote was decided by one wallet holding 99.9% of voting power, which the community correctly called centralization theater. Emissions got bumped from 1.5% to up to 5%, which means more dilution unless the new leadership actually deploys it well.
By every metric people use to judge a DeFi protocol, SushiSwap is losing.
And yet.
Most of the protocols that launched alongside it in 2020 are dead. Not “in decline.” Dead. Yam, Pickle, Cream, Hegic, Harvest, that whole food-themed cohort. Contracts paused, websites expired, founders gone, no fees being generated.
SushiSwap is still operating across 40+ chains. It launched on Solana via Jupiter in February 2026. It still pays 0.05% of every swap to xSUSHI stakers, which is real fee revenue from real trading, not printed yield. New leadership (Alex McCurry via Synthesis) bought 10M+ SUSHI tokens in December for around $3.3M of his own money. Could be a savior story. Could be someone scooping a dying brand cheap. Nobody knows yet.
The thing nobody quite says out loud is that SushiSwap is a roach.
I mean that as a compliment. A roach is something that’s been hit by so many things that whatever didn’t kill it, by selection, made it harder to kill next time. A founder rug? Survived. A successor who turned out to be the biggest fraud in crypto? Survived. Forks attacking the forker? Survived. A 98% TVL drawdown? Still here. A governance crisis where the entire DAO is basically one wallet? Still shipping.
This isn’t a “buy SUSHI” post. The math on the token is ugly and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. If emissions stay at 5% and the price keeps grinding down, xSUSHI yield gets eaten by token decline and stakers lose in real terms. If the multi-chain thesis doesn’t pay off, none of this matters. If McCurry turns out to be another character in the saga rather than the end of it, we’ll be writing another version of this post in 2028.
What I’m saying is more boring than the bull case.
DeFi’s history won’t be written by the protocols that pumped. It’ll be written by the ones that absorbed punishment without dying. The ones forced to learn governance because their original governance failed. Forced to become multi-chain because their home chain got too expensive. Forced to figure out real fee revenue because their token couldn’t keep printing.
Traditional finance still has banks that survived 1929, 1987, 2008, and 2020. Not because those banks are well-run. Because they survived. And surviving is the only thing that compounds eventually.
The question I keep asking: at what point does SushiSwap stop being a “dying protocol” and start being a “survived protocol”? Is there a TVL number? Or is it just time? Has any DeFi 1.0 brand actually crossed that line yet, or are they all still in the “could die any day” bucket?
Curious what people actually think. Especially anyone who held through the Nomi/SBF era and is still here. What kept you around? Or did you leave and you’re just lurking now?

EVM has a lot more utility than this, changing settlement rails is a huge development pool along same with cross chain oracles and tokenization of RWAs. Governance is still very early while it may have concentration risk now in the future when more institutions need to participate in protocol votes then DAO tokens will have significantly more value. Price doesn’t matter for tokens to a certain degree. Crypto outside of value storage is still very new to the vast majority of people. Lots of backend changes to existing financial systems will occur with most people not even realizing it. LPs have proven to be a very efficient system of being market takers, taking away traditional taker activity that charge significantly more for their role. Everything is being tested in real world uses so the losses of normal traders shouldn’t really affect the judgement of the industry.
Most chains are not mature yet which is why you may think its all about gambling. SOL for example and the whole meme coin sector doesn’t bode well for the image. In reality if you don’t consider the gains or losses of the meme coin traders, they are testing the scalability and ability of the chain to process transactions smoothly when traders overload it on the pump and dumps.
Retail investors are probably mostly here not to learn but for the volatile price action so they will get rinsed out, this is pretty much what happens in every new asset class and in the grand scheme of markets their losses are pretty insignificant. Imo retail trading activity and noise doesn’t affect the market in a material way. OTC desks and institutional traders are not bothered to comment on the volatility and subsectors that fizzle out. These are just the natural progression of a new sector.

Has anyone ever read [Barbarians at the Gates](https://share.google/jVV7d5hZQ6Jm2HOsD)? (yes, I am old!). Well, maybe you even remember having seen some similar storyline 3-4 years ago in crypto.. (hints: Fei, Aragon, Rook).
The extremely short tldr is: control of large capital pools via formal governance mechanisms.
Fast-forward to today, and [according to some people](https://x.com/DefiIgnas/status/2051787156906181113?s=20), this is happening again, and GnosisDAO is the target (Martin Koeppelmann actually re-posted the following post).
*"RFV Raiders are back. Gnosis DAO is the new target. It's a fun game, but first... a reminder: In 2023 Real Value Raiders took down Rook (5x return), Tribe (Fei wind-down), and you'll probably remember they pushed Aragon to repurpose its treasury (they fought back).*
***Old playbook was finding DAOs where token mcap < treasury value, accumulate enough tokens, force a dissolution vote, distribute the treasury pro-rata.. Now the playbook is harder to fight.***
*GIP-150 on Gnosis is the new playbook: Gnosis treasury sits at $223M (ETH, stables, ecosystem tokens). 1.3M GNO tokens are eligible to redeem against it. So each redeemable GNO has \~$170 of treasury behind it. But GNO trades at $135.95. That's a \~$33 per GNO discount to NAV. Or 24% gain risk free if redemption goes through. (Although RFVs likely bought at lower price). So holders started asking: why am I funding Ltd while my GNO trades below treasury?*
*GIP-150 proposes opt-in redemption. Holders surrender GNO, get their share of the treasury back. Liquid assets (ETH, stables) distributed at face value. Illiquid investments (offchain investments, Gnosis Ltd value) gets a claim token (gLTD-CLAIM) that pays out as values realize.. So this opt-in design is supposed to protect non-participants.*
*The RFV logic has a point: If Gnosis Ltd takes \~$30M/year of DAO money and produced $400k of revenue AND token trades below NAV, token holders' aren't happy.*
***So these 'attacks' put responsibility towards token holders. It also protects holders from teams that slow-quit by burning treasury in salaries while not really building anything. But for RFVs this is pure arbitrage trade, not some moral mission.***
*In this case almost every DAO and projects beyond Hyperliquid and Tron should be shut down and Treasuries returned to token holders.* ***Whatever Gnosis Ltd is actually building (Gnosis Pay, Circles, Gnosis Chain) loses funding, and some of that work has real users****. That is why I voted Against.* ***And building takes time. Plus market is bad so it is common that token trades under NAV for years****. Every other DAO trading below NAV becomes a target. Beefy is next btw. Builders at DAO-funded entities now have to plan for potential redemption votes from coordinated holders. Think to do buybacks, pump token or whatever."*