Composability · v1
SushiSwap
Uniswap fork that executed the vampire attack — liquidity bought with SUSHI emissions.
TradFi →Hostile takeover via equity incentives
Prerequisites
01 · Concept — what problem does it solve?
If code is open-source, what's defensible? SushiSwap forked Uniswap v2 byte-for-byte and answered: nothing but liquidity — and liquidity can be bought. By paying SUSHI tokens to anyone staking Uniswap tokens, then migrating that liquidity wholesale, Sushi executed DeFi's first : ~$1B of Uniswap's liquidity walked out the door in two weeks.
02 · Mechanics
- Vampire attack: stage 1 — reward staked UNI-V2 LP tokens with SUSHI emissions; stage 2 — atomically redeem them and re-deposit into identical Sushi pools.
- xSUSHI: stake SUSHI to receive 0.05% of the 0.30% swap fee (LPs keep 0.25%) — fee-sharing token holders, unlike UNI at the time.
- MasterChef: the emissions contract that became the most-forked farming primitive in DeFi.
- BentoBox: later-era vault that lends idle pool capital out, layering yield under the (proto-Fluid thinking).
03 · Formulas
// MasterChef reward accounting
pending = user.amount · accSushiPerShare − user.rewardDebt
accSushiPerShare += emission·Δblocks / totalStaked
// fee split per swap
0.30% total = 0.25% → LPs + 0.05% → xSUSHI
04 · Edge cases & risks
- Chef Nomi incident — anonymous founder sold the dev-fund SUSHI (~$14M) mid-launch, cratering trust; later returned it. Key-person risk is real even in "decentralized" protocols.
- Mercenary liquidity — emissions-bought liquidity leaves when emissions fall; the problem OlympusDAO's was invented to solve. See OHM.
- Fork game theory — the attack permanently changed protocol design: token launches, fee switches, and liquidity moats all trace to this event.
Connected concepts