SushiSwap is making good on its January promises to launch a derivatives trading platform. But instead of building it from scratch, it’s gone out and bought one.
The popular Ethereum-based decentralized exchange (DEX) announced the acquisition of Vortex Protocol today for an undisclosed amount.
Built atop Sei Network, a blockchain using Cosmos’ tooling, the on-chain trading platform will come under the SushiSwap umbrella as another product and will take a new name.
Why Some SushiSwap Stakers Are Jumping Ship
Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) SushiSwap, the popular decentralized exchange, made a tough call this week as it navigates the ongoing bear market. On December 5, project lead Jared Grey proposed that all staking fees on the platform be redirected to the project’s treasury for a year. He added that a new tokeonomics model for the project is also “on the horizon,” suggesting quite a shake-up for SushiSwap. Currently, users that stake their SUSHI—the proje...
Vortex Protocol is a not-yet-launched decentralized derivatives exchange and will offer users 10x margin trading on a variety of assets. Sei Network and Sushi’s newly-acquired Vortex Protocol will both launch on mainnet in Q2 of 2023.
“This acquisition is a direct partnership between the SEI, Vortex, and Sushi teams to help bring to market the first fully on-chain perpetual DEX via Sushi,” SushiSwap’s CEO Jared Grey told Decrypt.
The co-founder of Sei Network Jayendra Jog said that conversations around the acquisition began at the end of last year.
SushiSwap to launch on Cosmos
The move also means that SushiSwap will be one of the first Ethereum applications to make the move over to the Cosmos ecosystem. Another Ethereum-native derivatives exchange called dYdx has also signaled that it would aim to launch on Cosmos in Q2.
The advantage of building on Cosmos is that it lets developers spin up blockchains specifically tailored to a project’s needs. From modifying the network's consensus mechanism or opting to run a native validator set (rather than turn to Cosmos for shared security), it’s all in the developers' hands, says Jog.
SushiSwap Axes Lending Protocol and Token Launchpad
Ethereum-based decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol SushiSwap has made the decision to shut down Kashi, its lending protocol, and Miso, its token launchpad. Founded in 2020, SushiSwap allows customers to swap, lend, and borrow cryptocurrencies using their own external wallets, such as MetaMask, in contrast to centralized exchanges such as Coinbase. Explaining the move, the group’s chief technology officer (CTO) Matthew Lilley said in a tweet that Kashi “had a number of design flaws, ran at a lo...
“We chose to make use of the Cosmos SDK [Software Development Kit] because it's extremely modular and extremely easy to get a chain off the ground,” the Sei Network co-founder told Decrypt. “And then you can tweak whatever you need to tweak to make that chain better.”
And this is precisely what Sei and Vortex have done.
Purpose-built for spinning up decentralized exchanges, Jog explained that the Sei team has adjusted block processing on the chain, decreased finality to 300 milliseconds, and introduced a feature called parallelization that boasts up to 22,000 orders per second on its internal testnet.
These features, and “a cross-chain thesis that we resonated with,” are all part of what made the latest acquisition so enticing, said SushiSwap’s Jared Grey.
