Sushiswap's Grey area

Let's hope he's washed his hands.

After a long period of instability, the hiring of Jared Grey was supposed to bring back some focus to the “community fork” of Uniswap. But that focus has been misplaced already.

It’s been a rough year for Sushiswap.

Maki was forced out, Delong ragequit, and Sesta’s merge plans ended with the Sifu scandal. Then, as Sushi tried to move forward with a new roadmap, there was widespread outrage at the proposed salary for a new “Head Chef”.

Eventually, the salary plans were revised, Grey was appointed, and Goldentree (one of two whale addresses who secured Grey’s victory) announced a $5M investment.

It looked like everything was back on track for Sushi…

A proud tweet introducing the new boss told us to:

Stay tuned for Jared's next steps.

With Sushi rumoured to be soon launching new pools for stablecoin swaps, this news has not come at a good time.

But perhaps Jared shouldn’t be allowed near stables anyway.

Now, rather than focusing on the future of Sushiswap, Grey’s past involvement in other projects has come back to haunt him…

…and to top it off, he’s even been saddled with accusations of foal play.

Amongst the wilder (false) allegations of horseplay, legitimate concerns are being brushed over…

When announcing his new position, Grey received a reply alluding to his supposed “role in rug pulling Encore Finance” which mainly flew under the radar at the time.

However, a week later, a longer thread by YannickCrypto with info on Grey’s past projects has picked up more traction.

The earliest complaint against Grey comes from 2012, before his crypto days, when claims of copyright infringement were made regarding advertising materials for Multiplex PC. The blog post goes on to detail shady marketing techniques used by the firm as well as Grey’s response that “the email account associated with it had been hijacked some time ago”.

Years later, in 2019, he became the CEO of ALQO, shortly before ALQO’s Liberio wallet was released. The wallet was used to drain various users funds via the private keys, which a team member had access to. Investigations were published at the time on Bitcointalk.org and include Jared Grey’s responses downplaying the issue.

This is the only (non-equine) accusation Grey has responded to directly:

my business partner stole funds from our community while I was busy raising funds to launch the Bitfineon exchange.

The investors & I found out, fired him, and refunded the affected users.

The official Medium article Grey links to is from November 2019, eight months after the alarm was first raised and states that “lead developer Kevin Collmer stalled or outright declined requests to make the source code available” and that “Liberio was built and architected solely by him”.

Regardless if Grey was involved in the hacking of user funds, what kind of CEO allows wallet software to be released to users with absolutely no oversight?

“Busy raising funds” doesn’t cut it as an excuse.

The following year ALQO rebranded to EONS, transferred to Ethereum, and people moved on…

There are other, less fact-based accusations from 2020 regarding EnCore and Bitfineon.

Grey has been present in all of these projects, each of which has been accused of some sort of malpractice. While some concerns are more credible than others, the sheer number of suspect projects means they warrant addressing.

There may well be reasonable explanations, but by dismissing concerns without going into details, Grey is simply fuelling CT’s meme-driven rumour mill, while using the ridiculousness of one accusation to distract from the rest.

Personal reputation aside, it seems unbelievable that after such a dramatic year for Sushi, the background of their potential Head Chef didn’t raise red flags during the selection process.

We approached the Sushi team for a comment on their due diligence process, but received no reply.

The Sushi community appears to be sleepwalking through due diligence, perhaps in a state of apathy brought on by the relentless drama they have suffered over the last twelve months.

Sushiswap has played a key role in the storyline of DeFi, and it would be a shame to see them drop out of the race.

Hopefully they’re not backing the wrong horse this time…

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