Swap SUSHI at the Best Rate

What is SUSHI?

SUSHI is an ERC-20 token that carries voting weight over Sushi, an automated market maker and swap aggregator deployed across dozens of networks. It was created in August 2020 by the pseudonymous developers Chef Nomi and 0xMaki, who copied Uniswap's open-source contracts and added the one thing Uniswap then lacked: a token that pays its holders a share of protocol activity.

That token was the bait in DeFi's most famous liquidity migration. Users who staked Uniswap pool tokens into Sushi's contracts earned SUSHI, and in September 2020 those positions were migrated wholesale, moving roughly 800 million dollars of liquidity, about half of Uniswap's total, onto the new exchange in one transaction batch.

How SUSHI works

The exchange works like any constant-product market maker: liquidity providers deposit token pairs, traders pay a 0.3% fee on most pools, and the fee splits between liquidity providers and the protocol. Later versions added concentrated liquidity, a route processor that aggregates prices across venues, and SushiXSwap for cross-chain swaps.

SUSHI's own mechanism is the SushiBar. Staking SUSHI mints xSUSHI, and a 0.05% cut of swap volume has historically been used to buy SUSHI for stakers. Governance has redirected that flow when funds ran short: the Kanpai proposal of January 2023 sent 100% of those fees to the treasury through 19 December 2023, and distributions to the bar resumed afterward.

SUSHI supply and tokenomics

SUSHI launched with no premine but very high farming emissions, and an early community vote capped supply at 250 million tokens, a ceiling the protocol reached as vesting wound down. The cap stopped binding in June 2024, when the Buru no Shinka restructuring minted 25 million SUSHI for Sushi Labs and introduced a baseline 1.5% annual emission rate.

In December 2025 a governance vote raised that annual emission rate to as much as 5% of supply, roughly 14 million SUSHI a year, earmarked for liquidity mining, listings and growth incentives. Supply is therefore no longer fixed: it grows at whatever rate governance most recently approved.

Who builds SUSHI

Sushi's leadership history is turbulent. Chef Nomi sold the development fund's SUSHI for about 14 million dollars a week after launch, returned the money amid community outrage, and handed admin keys to FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried, who completed the migration and passed control to a community multisig. From October 2022 the project was run by a head chef, the title Sushi gives its lead executive.

Since June 2024 development has been led by Sushi Labs, an operating company spun up by the Buru no Shinka proposal with a 25 million SUSHI treasury grant. In December 2025, Synthesis founder Alex McCurry took over as chief executive after acquiring more than 10 million SUSHI, with the outgoing head chef moving to an advisory role.

How SUSHI is governed

Formal power sits with the Sushi DAO. Proposals are debated on the forum and decided on Snapshot, where voting weight, called SUSHIPOWAH, comes from xSUSHI and staked liquidity positions and a proposal needs a 5 million quorum. Treasury execution runs through a multisig, and since 2024 a council structure, including the High Kitchen and Treasury Council, handles operations.

In practice voting power is concentrated. The December 2025 vote that tripled the emission rate was decided by a single wallet holding about 99.9% of the votes cast, so check who actually voted before reading an outcome as community consensus.

What people use SUSHI for

Beyond trading it, SUSHI is held for the rights it carries inside the protocol: a say in governance votes and a stake-based claim on the exchange's fee flows.

• Stake SUSHI for xSUSHI to collect the bar's share of trading fees.
• Vote on Sushi DAO proposals with SUSHIPOWAH from xSUSHI or liquidity positions.
• Provide SUSHI liquidity in pools on Sushi and other exchanges.
• Use SUSHI as collateral where lending markets accept it.

SUSHI risks and considerations

SUSHI's supply rules have changed twice in two years by governance vote, and the December 2025 emission increase passed with almost all voting power in one wallet, so both dilution and decision-making are concentration risks. The fee flow to xSUSHI has been switched off before, for the whole of 2023, and can be redirected again.

The project has also faced external pressure: its then head chef and the Sushi DAO itself received subpoenas from the US Securities and Exchange Commission in March 2023, and total value locked has fallen far below its 2021 peak. SUSHI on other networks is a bridged deployment, so verify the contract address before trading there.