$SUSHI Price Doubles After Creator Shifts Control To FTX CEO

Chef Nomi, the pseudonymous creator of the Uniswap-like DeFi protocol, today transferred his control to the CEO of crypto exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried.

Nomi had angered the SushiSwap community by withdrawing $13 million from $SUSHI's liquidity pool on decentralized exchange Uniswap. The community, as well as the General Manager of SushiSwap, 0xMaki, turned on him and alleged that he had pulled an exit-scam—something Nomi denied. Then Nomi went to sleep.

Finally awake and forced to confront the mounting outrage, Nomi gave the admin keys to Bankman-Fried, who two hours prior had tweeted: "Nomi sucks and hurt the community," and "If Nomi doesn't step down, it's over for Sushi."

Bankman-Fried thanked Nomi for giving him the keys and laid out his plans for SushiSwap. He said he will devolve power to the community once more by transferring control to a multi-sig address controlled by leaders elected by the community. "After that -- Sushi shall be back in the community's hands," he tweeted.

Nomi said in a tweet after transferring control: "I hope SushiSwap does well without me. Again I did not intend to do any harm. I'm sorry if my decision did not follow what you expected. But I want to stress again and I did not intend to scam anyone. No LPs are lost whatsoever. I kept all my promises."

The token price of $SUSHI spiked after the announcement from $1.24 to highs of $3, per metrics site CoinMarketCap. But many still harbor ill against Chef Nomi and wonder whether he will return the $12 million he withdrew from Uniswap.

Andre Cronje, founder of yEarn, a major DeFi protocol, tweeted: "Are you leaving the project? If so, are you giving the dev funds back? All you did so far was hand over a token that was built off of UniswapProtocol. Weren't the funds meant to further develop? Aren't you that developer?"