Your moniker, I’m Software, is so unique, so I have to start by asking: How did you get it and what’s the meaning?
There’s a well-known theory that we’re all living in a simulation. If that were true, in a sense it would mean that we’re all software. Simulation theory aside, though, cause this theory is essentially true. We’re all software running on hardware, an organic machine, the human body.
When you’re not having profound existential thoughts, what does your day-to-day look like at Sushi?
I’m an agnostic software engineer, which means I’m highly flexible and have been able to add value in various areas of the Sushi eco-system as a whole. The better question is what do I not do at Sushi. As a developer, I can help out in pretty much any way possible since I’m comfortable with both the backend and frontend. These days, however, I am focusing on supporting the frontend side of things.
What were you up to before joining Sushi?
I tried working for a “real” company for about a year in my early 20’s and promised myself that I would never do that again. When I started university, I was 17 years old and had just started my first freelance gig, a gig that was too good to pass up so it made me put my university on hold to pursue it. Ever since then, apart from that brief stint at the traditional organization, I’ve been working as a freelancer and have been loving it. I never did go back to school, so when the pandemic started I figured it was a great time to revisit that.
During my breaks from lessons is when I discovered SushiSwap. The infamous SushiSwap introductory Medium article mentioned that their team was looking for people to help build out the ecosystem. I had a few weeks of holiday from school, so I thought, ‘Why not?’ and started building the Analytics UI.
My original plan was to earn my compensation by finishing Analytics and leave it at that, since I was determined to finish school this time around. I loved Sushi and loved being a part of the community, but because I had this goal in mind, I was pretty hesitant to take on a full-time role. I guess there’s a spoiler to how this story ends, seeing that you’re interviewing me right now. You may have guessed it, school’s back on hold and I’ve somehow been at the right place, at the right time, again.
Before this opportunity fell into my lap, I was working on research and product development for Bitcoin’s layer 2 solution, the Lightning Network, alongside my regular job as a full-stack independent contractor.
Layer 2 solutions interest me in terms of mass adoption, but we’re still in the early days, and it seems that friction is too high at this point for that to see fruition. I was surprised to find that almost the opposite is true in Ethereum. There is still some friction, but much less, so users have fewer understanding gaps before using an L2 solution. This is a positive for Ethereum-like protocols and the ecosystem as a whole in my opinion.
How did you first get involved with Sushi?
I stumbled across Sushi totally by accident. I was somewhat aware of De-Fi, but hadn’t invested much time into researching the space, it had been a few years since I had worked on anything related to Ethereum. As a software engineer, and similar to Omakase’s origin story, I enjoyed checking out the trending repositories on GitHub once and a while, and one fateful day in early September I came across the SushiSwap repo, which lead me to the original article and the call for builders. I had some free time and was looking for some part-time work, so I got involved, and it quickly turned into a full-time job.
I initially built Sushi Analytics and supporting infrastructure for it on a grant basis. In November/December this was put into maintenance mode and I was free to start looking for other areas to add value. My next goal was to standardize and bring parity to the development environments used for our Solidity-based products, including adding a more productive and robust test suite, testing methods, and researching a security model for Solidity projects.
I really liked the idea of bringing Sushi to as many networks as possible and took the lead on this with support from the core team. Sushi, I believe, was the first major exchange to have a presence on multiple EVM-compatible networks. Many people might be surprised to know that I have deployed Sushi on seven alternative main networks, a dozen test networks, with many, many more in the pipeline. This is something I’m very proud of, we were far ahead of the curve, and I think this sparked an interest in other major projects to show a presence on alternative networks like we’re seeing today.
Can you let us know a bit more about how you built the subgraphs for Sushi? What’s generally the process for that?
Analytics needed data, lots of data, which wasn’t readily available. The Graph seemed like the obvious solution to the problem. Using the blockchain to build up data points I needed was impractical, and non-trivial without supporting infrastructure like a database. And it’s expensive, really expensive.
The nice thing about subgraphs is they’re free to host via The Graph’s hosted service, and open to all. Once you publish a Subgraph the API is public for anybody to use. We had inherited a Subgraph used by Uniswap to monitor the exchange, but we still needed more.
I think this was important to encourage integration. In-terms of the overall process, I would recommend The Graph’s documentation since that’s exactly where I started with zero knowledge of subgraph. I think this brought clarity to the team, who were happy to have a streamlined data hub. In the early days, it was important to get this right and then really get it out there to the public.
You may not know that there’s a laundry list of massive applications that use our price feeds for a tonne of tokens.
What was the most shocking data that ever resulted from one of your analytic queries?
When I was building Analytics no one had any idea about the user data on Sushi. I think in a lot of people’s minds they thought there were a lot of whales basically controlling Sushi. To the point that people thought that Sushi was made up of 99% whales and to the point that even I thought this. When I actually got to see the data for the first time, it was somewhat true, but not anywhere near as bad as anyone had imagined.
There was a tonne of grassroots support. I think a lot of that came from the exposure of what happened with Chef Nomi. There was such a media frenzy around that event that the marketing unintentionally pushed more users to Sushi. After that there were even more users than I expected, lower-level users than whales, which was a pleasant surprise.
What I think people might find interesting is that the Sushi AMM tends to spike in activity when overall token prices are falling. There’s an interesting dynamic since there is pressure against the SUSHI price falling too hard in a bear market. When everyone’s selling during a market sell-off or crash, all the token prices are falling on Sushi, but the SUSHI token is kind of holding price-wise because so much value is being created from the volume on the exchange.
SUSHI resists a hard drop, because so much value is added to the token from real volume underneath it and real platform use, such as fees being accrued everyday, which I think is something not a lot of projects can say without it being hot water.
Which analytical tools are on the horizon for Sushi?
The analytics app is being completely redesigned at the moment and it will be forged in with the main application soon. We will be looking to add more Kashi-related analytics, MISO-related analytics and, going forward, any new products that we roll out. We’ve been taking a lot of consideration to the feedback we’ve been receiving from our community, particularly on our Discord, and looking to incorporate some of their analytical suggestions. I encourage any readers of this article to share their thoughts in the general channel of our Discord.
What analytics do you think are missing from the Sushi ecosystem right now that you think would be beneficial?
I think we have everything we need for the AMM and the reward pools. I just think that for our new products, particularly MISO, it’s going to be very interesting to see how these recipes are concocted and the data behind that. With all the ingredients to the various MISO recipes, it could get a little expensive on Ethereum. So I’d be interested to see how MISO fares on other chains and just more multichain data, in general, would be cool to analyze.
We have so many products rolling out and new business verticals we’re expanding to at Sushi. Which of these are you most excited about and why?
We use a protocol called Sablier finance to receive our salaries as Sushi team members. For those who are unfamiliar, your entire yearly salary gets dumped into a vault and a little bit gets unlocked every block. As a platform that always shouts from the rooftops about taking advantage of available yields for idle crypto assets, it’s hard to stare at that lump sum knowing it’s just sitting there, stuck. So we are actually building a new Sablier that will be a dapp within Sushi’s BentoBox token vault. That way our salaries, which are, to a varying degree, paid in SUSHI, can be staked in the SushiBar while they are locked. I know this isn’t for end-users, but it’s just too ironic to not have our organizational structure built this way, so I’m glad we’re heading this route.
From a user perspective, I’m excited for more Sushi DeFi tools to start deploying on some other chains, so more people can reap the benefits of this incredible protocol and community.
Internally, you are probably one of the biggest multichain advocates. Why do you think multichain deployment is so important and what are you doing to support that?
I think it’s important mainly to support these other networks, who are trying out new ideas and providing solutions because the average person is priced out of Ethereum.
So these other networks give the average person the opportunity to play with DeFi and all these cool DeFi apps and tools that, until now, were only available on Ethereum.
A few months ago we were so far ahead in terms of multichain deployment and development, but Kashi ended up being a much bigger project that captured a lot of the team’s attention. Although we’re so happy with the Kashi product and thrilled at the benefits it delivers to our users, it lost us a bit of the multichain edge I think we might have had, but we’re back and focused on providing support to more chains.
What are some insider details about working at Sushi?
It’s untraditional in structure, the orginisation is decentralised and members live all across the globe and in completely different timezones. This is quite challenging for obvious reasons, but something I think we have adapted quite well to it. Sushi is also very supportive as a whole.
If you show interest in Sushi, Sushi will return that favor.
There are so many success stories from core members and non-core members alike. So much so that it’s become difficult to track them all.
Even with your busy work weeks, you must still have some hobbies, so tell us: What do you like to do outside of Sushi?
I really enjoy gaming, at one point in time a professional gaming career was one path I was exploring, but age caught up with me. Now I like to use some of those skills but in a more recreational way with my childhood friends when we both have time to play. Before this article, we chatted about how many times I’ve broken my wrist and arms. To fill in the audience: 4. That’s due to my passion for anything boarding: Snowboarding, skateboarding, surfboarding, you name it. Like the rest of the team, I don’t have much time for pastimes these days, but if I did, that’s what I’d like to do.
What’s your favourite sushi?
I’ve honestly never eaten Sushi in my life.
Author’s note: We’re getting him to try sushi when we do our team meet-up (post-pandemic), although, by the sound of it, we might have to tie him up first.
Keep on the look out for more weekly Sushi core team interviews!
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