As part of a new ongoing series, the Sushi team wants to reveal the real person behind the avatar. Well, almost. Every week we will be unveiling a new interview with a different team member, but anonymity is still on the table. It wouldn’t be DeFi without a little bit of mystery, would it?
With all the new products set to launch across SushiSwap over the next few weeks, we thought the timing couldn’t be better to take a step back and chat with one of the Sushi OGs, the man who’s been with us from the start: Jiro Ono.
Please describe your current role at Sushi.com.
Hi, my name is Jiro, and I’m a developer, who is part of the core team here at SushiSwap. I find myself doing a lot of different stuff day-to-day and am responsible for most of the integration tasks. Some of the stuff I work on include: Subgraph management, UI development, wallet support, token integrations, and Onsen direction. Particularly due to my role in the Onsen Program, I have been exposed to a more biz dev heavy role these days. I have really been enjoying collaborating with all of the great protocols and projects in our ecosystem.
Where could we catch the real you on the weekends?
I try to get out and do as much surfing as I can, whenever I can find the time.
How did you first get involved with SushiSwap?
Alright so this actually quite the story, but basically at the time of SushiSwap’s first announcement, I was what you would call a humble farmer. Towards the end of “DeFi Summer” I was pretty immersed with everything that was going on at that time, then the Medium post, The SushiSwap Project, came out and it really snapped me back to reality. The idea of a full community-owned DEX was really what intrigued me the most, so I joined the Discord and started connecting with other developers like Zippo and Omakase early on.
I think it was only a couple of days after reading the Medium post that I woke up to absolute madness brewing on Twitter and Discord about ‘The Great Nomi Escape.’ I personally thought it was all over from there and figured Sushi would soon just be a blimp in our memory. To the community’s surprise, and particularly to my own, SBF became Head Chef and was all of a sudden in control of the keys with a multisig on the way. I think we had a day or two before the migration, and a half working UI that was in need of lots of changes, before any of said migration could even happen.
With Nomi nowhere to be found, I took it upon myself to get a working UI in place and that’s where sushiswapclassic.org came in. Initially, the plan was to use sushiswapclassic.org as the backup in case the new shiny frontend wasn’t done in time. So the night before migration, I pushed through, what I thought was, the last bit of changes, setup Cloudflare and went to bed thinking not much was needed from me the following day.
It seemed that history was to repeat itself as I woke up to another eventful morning. Lots of messages started rolling in and to my surprise, I even had a missed call from SBF himself. I jumped out of bed, hopped online and was greeted by this message:
“Currently sushiswapclassic.org is our new site post migration, just so you know.”
I was still working a “day” job at the time, and immediately logged on to tell my old boss that “I was sick and would be out the rest of the week”. The next 5 hours or so felt like a war room, we quickly realized there was a lot that still needed to be done. While I was manually pushing changes to the UI, the rest of the group was working through getting the first pool working for migration.
When it came time to migrate the first pool, I remember we were at the time complaining about 30 gwei gas prices.
After the longest 40 seconds I’ve ever experienced waiting for that first migration transaction to go through, a green Success popped up on Etherscan. First step down! Now to test the UI… which we quickly discovered, wasn’t working…
A couple of hours later, we were finally done and I spent the rest of the night relishing in the madness of the day. What I didn’t know at that time, was that the real journey was actually just beginning.
A couple of weeks later, Omakase and I were the first developers to be put up for vote to join the core Sushi team. Soon after, I found myself calling my boss again to say I’d be sick, permanently.
How has the organization and DeFi landscape changed since you first started?
That is a loaded question… What is the saying in DeFi? A week is like a month or longer here, something like that. Whatever the exact saying is, it’s proving itself to be true, because the organization and the entire DeFi landscape has seen immense growth since I first started. For a couple of months, there were only a handful of us involved full-time in the project, but now I think we are at around 20 or more, with even more helping out on the side. The community grows more and more each day, and to be honest it’s a pretty awesome thing to see.
Outside of the organization, the rest of the DeFi landscape has grown even more and it’s definitely been fun to see everything coming along as it has been. The amount of collaboration happening between projects right now is quite cool to experience and I really think this has been the main driver for the immense growth we’ve seen in the space over the last year.
To me, it just really does feel like one of those Golden Age moments in time that you’d be crazy not to take part in.
With a lot of competitors and copycats out there, what do you think sets apart SushiSwap?
To start with, I don’t think there is anything wrong with copycats and competition. DeFi is an open-source space, and that type of environment inherently pushes it forward at the break-neck speed that we all are witnessing. I also think the market does a good job of separating those making an impact from those that are just trying to make a quick buck.
In regard to what separates us from the rest, it’s the community, 100%. I don’t think there are many projects out there providing their LPs with 90% of the token to be used for governance and entitlement to current and future fees with all Sushi products. This really is what separates us from the competition, and I believe what will continue to separate us from the future competition. The core team works for the community, and simply put, I think this is what gives us such strong network effects and allows us to attract talented individuals, who contribute in ways they see fit to benefit the community as a whole.
As the proverbial Onsen Master, can you give a simple rundown of what Onsen is and how SushiSwap users can benefit from participating?
Onsen initially started as a way for us to grow our share of liquidity and establish easy collaboration opportunities with other projects. We initially imagined it as a rotating menu of small, upcoming projects, but it’s quickly grown to become a rather large and vibrant yield menu. Some of the most exciting projects in the space started on Onsen, and it’s been really cool to work with all of these projects first hand.
For our users, I think Onsen has been quite a boon for them. While providing high sushi yields, we’ve also introduced many of them to new and exciting projects that they probably would have never heard of.
There is really no better way to start getting involved and to support a project than to stake some liquidity.
We also put in a pretty good amount of effort into our vetting process, and to this day we haven’t had a rug pull for any of the Onsen pools. This is something that I think is really important and I pledge to stay focused on continuing that streak in the future.
Also, a little bit of alpha for our readers, keep an eye on our timelocks! Every Onsen update is queued on-chain 48hrs before it becomes live, so if you check regularly, you can be one of the first to know what new Onsen pools are just around the corner.
With Onsen still in its infancy, since mid-round pools only just came out, how do you see Onsen evolving?
Recently we’ve started launching more pools on a rolling basis, as new projects come out every week. With that, we now start all Onsen pools with 5 allocation points, and adjust based on different criteria, every couple of weeks.
As for future Onsen, one of the first things coming soon, probably within the next month, is Double Incentives. We basically simplified the process for projects to reward liquidity providers with the project’s native token and, thus, LPs can now earn yield in the form of SUSHI, plus another token on top of our own.
Further down the line, I think Onsen will eventually become a completely dynamic system that distributes SUSHI yield based on things like: Volume and/or TVL, in a fair and transparent matter. There’s definitely more to experiment with, in regards to Onsen, and I think it will continue to evolve over time.
Apart from Onsen, what are you excited about in terms of the future of Sushi.com?
To be honest there really is so much to be excited for. We’ve got a handful of new products launches coming out with BentoBox, Kashi, Miso, Mirin, among others. On the AMM side, we’ve recently deployed all of the AMM contracts onto various chains (Polkadot, Matic, etc.) and we’ll continue to grow the Sushi experience on each of those chains, with all of the transaction fees always coming home to xSUSHI holders.
But with all of these exciting things happening, you know what excites me the most? The unknown.
What we’re building at Sushi is more than an AMM, we're fostering a community that provides the opportunity for individuals to explore and push forward ideas that others couldn’t even imagine. And that’s what excites me even more, is the future potential of Sushi and DAO that is starting to take shape and that will provide us all with wild surprises in the future.
Any DeFi profound thoughts or your vision for the future of DeFi?
Still a lot of unknowns, a lot of experimenting. I see it as becoming more acceptable… but maybe accepted or acceptable is a bad word to use. At the very least more people are becoming comfortable with DeFi and as this continues to happen, I think the overall industry expansion will call for more open positions at both existing and new platforms. With that, I see a lot more talent coming into the space, which inherently will better it.
Again, for anything DeFi this is just the beginning and although there are a lot of unknowns, what really excites me is that we’re really just getting started.
What is being built and the community that is being fostered right now is so powerful, that I really don’t think there is anything that can stop it.
The future of France is bright, and I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of this story.
Also, to any of those on the outside looking in or for those still just dipping their toes in the water, all I got to say is, anon what are you waiting for? The future of France is now, and we need your help to build it.
Thanks to Amanda for the time, and to all those out there my DMs are always open on Twitter (0xJiro) or on Discord if you ever need to reach out.
Before you go, we have to know: What’s your favourite sushi?
Kampachi 🙂
Keep on the look out for more weekly Sushi core team interviews!
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