What is your role at Sushi?
I am the Asia Lead at Sushi, mainly responsible for growing Sushi’s brand awareness across Asian countries such as China, Japan, India, Vietnam, and so on, while focusing on building our ecosystem in that area through strategic partnerships.
To be more specific, I do some PR jobs like pitching top Asian crypto media, and lead many of our many, many business development deals.
How did you first hear about Sushi and how did you get involved?
I first learned about Sushi from reading the news actually and it rang a bell because I had heard some talk about it in a few crypto communities. There was such a media frenzy around Sushi last DeFi summer and crazy $SUSHI hype across the industry.
Then I started to learn more about it. When I really started to dig in I was quite impressed by its community, yield farming strategy, product design and operations. One day, some investors helped Sushi arrange its first WeChat AMA where Maki would be speaking and that’s how we first met. To be honest at that AMA the Chinese community, including myself, asked some pretty spicy questions, but Maki always replied in a polite and humble way.
I was really impressed by this that I reached out and we became WeChat friends. From time to time, I referred some projects and people to Maki that I thought would benefit Sushi to work with. After helping out voluntarily for quite some time, Maki and I talked about making a position for me on the core team and here we are!
What are some of the avenues that the BD Team are focused on these days?
BD team is working so hard on introducing great projects to the MISO platform to really solidify the brand at its onset and showcase some great opportunities to the Sushi community. We are also continuously working with projects that want to further incentivize their Sushi liquidity pairs by providing their native tokens rewards on top of the $SUSHI tokens for “double rewards” on our Onsen liquidity mining program.
In one month or so, MISO will be permissionless, meaning everyone and anyone can create their token there. But before that, we are doing a bit of a vetting process by pre-selecting some projects, mostly to try and help hand hold project launches and create a better IDO experience for everyone including, not only MISO project teams but, participants.
After a successful IDO on MISO, projects can apply for their token to be incentivized on Onsen. Now that our Masterchef V2 or double rewards is ready, projects can add their tokens as rewards as well to better boost liquidity and volume.
What solutions do you think Sushi can pursue to really take it to the next level?
I think we can really improve our UI/UX and prepare some helpful tutorials to guide users and developers in understanding how to use Sushi and really take advantage of all the benefits.
Do you think that Sushi needs to focus on onboarding the existing crypto community or crypto newcomers to increase its userbase and why?
Both should be our focus in my opinion. It will be much easier to promote Sushi to someone who has some knowledge about crypto, or someone who is already a DeFi protocol user, so the latter will be a much larger feat, but they are definitely both important and worth the effort.
Looking forward to seeing DeFi become mainstream :)
Being based in China yourself, can you tell us what Chinese crypto community is really like?
I do not think any overseas crypto media really knows what is happening here. Nor do I think Chinese crypto community has been understood well by the outside world.
Language barriers and a great firewall isolated Chinese crypto community from the rest of the world.
Few in the international community know just how many people here in China truly believe in and are passionate about crypto and the future of DeFi. Take, for instance, the fact that the founders of the top 3 exchanges by volume in the world are Chinese, most of their users are Chinese, and the largest mining pools are in China. That says something, right?
What does the Chinese community like about the SushiSwap?
One reason why they like us is because we have the best Chinese support across all the DeFi protocols. Chinese users like to use products that have Chinese versions and particularly are into mobile versions of platforms. So we launched Chinese UI and integrated it with pretty much all the major mobile wallets. In addition, we have had a Chinese language support system in place from very early on. We are actually expanding this by introducing our new engineer that will help collect and fix any bugs experienced by our Chinese users and we will onboard a new, dedicated community manager very soon.
The second reason is, I would say, due to our innovation. In the beginning, we came up with this fair launch token distribution and fun liquidity farming platform, which enticed people. Who doesn’t like sushi right? We also keep building new products, such as the lending product, Kashi, IDO platform, MISO, and the coming NFT platform, Shoyu. China is known for building things fast and I think that Sushi emulates this rhetoric.
Being our eyes and ears of our Asian userbase, what was one of the craziest ideas or feedback for Sushi that you heard from that community?
Let $SUSHI become the currency of every sushi restaurant.
So, how is the market sentiment in general towards DeFi in Asia? Do you see a lot of short term growth or interest growth?
Asia is huge and diversified. Sushi’s largest holders are mostly in Asia, many of them are long-term focused, providing us with constructive feedback from time to time. We are grateful for having them with us.
What do you think Sushi can do to help capture more of the Asian market? Is there any product of Sushi’s that you think has massive potential particularly in Asia or particularly in China?
To launch a phone app version of the Sushi platform and all it’s products would be the best thing to really catapult Sushi usership in China in my opinion.
The Sushi team always talks about meeting up together somewhere as a kind of company trip. If you could suggest any place in the world, where would it be and why?
Kyoto. Less crowded and more peaceful than Tokyo. Better for us to relax, chill and do some team building events there.
FYI Sushi Simps pretty much work 24/7. So we need a break to relax and get to know each other as well.
Aman Kyoto, what do you think?
What do you do for fun outside of Sushi? Any hobbies?
Traveling, I like traveling a lot, going to different places and countries and experiencing something different.
Unfortunately, because of COVID-19, I have not traveled for more than a year :(
What is your favourite Sushi?
Any seafood ones!
Bonus question: Like Japanese food, I think everyone also loves Chinese food. Any dish that you would recommend to our international audience that you think they maybe did not try yet?
Chinese sushi? It is quite popular in Shanghai.
Keep on the lookout for more weekly Sushi core team interviews!
Sushi is building a comprehensive DeFi ecosystem with AMM, leverage & margin trading platform, token launchpad and NFT artist platform. Follow our socials to keep up with our product launches and find out more on how you can make the most of your cryptocurrency assets with Sushi’s secure and powerful DeFi tools!
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