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Sushiswap Founder Transferred Control of the Project to FTX's CEO, What's Behind This Event?

Chef Nomi, the anonymous founder of decentralized exchange Sushiswap, has transferred the Sushiswap control to FTX’s CEO.

This event comes after the “exit scam” speculations in the crypto community after Chef Nomi announced on Twitter:

“Here’s what happened. The devshare part of me. I converted them to $ETH. I stop caring about price and I will focus on the technicality of the migration.”

Nomi’s Twitter post about transferring Sushiswap’s control to FTX CEO has caused great concerns and may have substantial impact on the price of SUSHI token.

On its first day in the DeFi market, Sushiswap reached $250 million in total value locked (TVL) in cryptocurrencies. The SUSHI token price has surged from around $0.70 on Aug. 30 to its highest of above $12 on Sep.1 and plunged to $1.20 today.

Regarding the project control transferring, Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FXT, responded with a series of tweets. It was not FTX’s ambition towards decentralized exchange or simply another case of marketing.

FTX was active in the capital market these days. Recently, the firm acquired Blockfolio for $150 million. However, the amount has not been verified by third-party audit companies. The news was disclosed in Blockfolio’s official Medium blog.

Sushiswap’s founder, Chef Nomi has remained anonymous, and the relationship between Nomi and the CEO of FTX has not been made clear. Time will tell if this event will revive the Sushiswap project or if it was just an opportunity to sell SUSHI before the token price’s second dip.

FTX’s CEO to Reduce Sushiswap Supply, Analytics Firm Suggests SUSHI’s Price is Overvalued

FTX’s CEO recently received control of the Sushiswap protocol from Sushiswap’s founder, Chef Nomi. A few days after receiving control over the Sushiswap protocol, FTX’s CEO Sam Bankman-Fried recently announced his ideas regarding the future of the protocol.

Chef Nomi, Sushiswap’s lead developer recently cashed out his SUSHI tokens in exchange for Ether. As Chef Nomi cashed out his millions worth of ETH, the crypto community called him out and said he was pulling an “exit scam.” Nomi then decided to transfer control over the protocol to FTX’s CEO.

Sushiswap is a hard fork of Uniswap, one of the most popular projects in the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector. With the DeFi hype, Sushiswap’s first day of trading in the DeFi market reached $250 million in its total value locked (TVL) in cryptocurrencies and has seen a massive rally early on. The SUSHI token price was valued at over $7 in early September but has now retraced to $2.30.

Sushiswap is very similar to Uniswap, which also allows investors who provide liquidity to pools to be rewarded on their platform. The difference between the two platforms is that Sushiswap promises its liquidity providers its token SUSHI, also similar to lending projects such as Aave’s LEND and Compound (COMP) in the DeFi space.

Bankman-Fried suggested that he will transfer the admin control to a multi-signature wallet. He enabled the decision to be based on a decentralized nature, therefore he put it to a vote, and the results read that 98.41 percent of the voters have agreed with him.

Currently, the total value locked in the Sushiswap protocol has exceeded $1.1 billion, at press time. Bankman-Fried further suggested that the token supply should be reduced:

“Maybe take the current schedule, but make 1/6 of the SUSHI unlocked, 1/3 locked for 1 year, and reduce rate by 50%. That means that SUSHI stakers have a long term interest in the health of the platform, and also that circulating supply is lowered.”

The FTX CEO also suggested that there could be a potential collaboration with Compound Finance (COMP) and Aave (LEND) to enable seamless margin trading on Sushiswap.

Regarding the future of Sushiswap, Bankman-Fried laid out a few priorities for the DeFi protocol, including ensuring the migration is successful and getting as much total value locked (TVL) through the transition.

Research by on-chain analytics firm Glassnode also noted that SUSHI may be worth far less than its current price, even after the SUSHI token took a 70 percent plunge in the last week. In reality, the firm suggested that a sustainable SUSHI price would be $0.31.

SushiSwap (SUSHI) Slashes Rewards and Total Value Locked Takes a Plunge—What Does This Say About LPs?

DeFi protocol SushiSwap (SUSHI) recently cut its rewards from 1,000 SUSHI tokens per block for liquidity providers, to 100 SUSHI tokens as of Ethereum block 10850000.

SushiSwap has been swarming in attention lately, in the DeFi industry, as it gained immense popularity since its existence. SushiSwap witnessed $250 million in total value locked (TVL) in cryptocurrencies on its first day of trading.

SushiSwap’s fate has come with many twists and turns, starting off with the fact that its founder, known as Chef Nomi, decided to sell his SUSHI tokens in exchange for Ether. Along with the cashing out, Chef Nomi decided to transfer the control of the protocol to FTX’s CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried. While Chef Nomi cashed out his SUSHI, the token price plunged dramatically, as the crypto community called his move an “exit scam.”

Bankman-Fried decided to transfer the admin control to a multi-signature wallet after the decision was made in a decentralized vote. SushiSwap successfully migrated $830 million of value locked in the SushiSwap protocol from Uniswap. With the migration SushiSwap accumulated in a 225 percent increase in total value locked (TVL). Along with the migration, Chef Nomi has returned $14M worth of Ether back to the project fund, allowing SUSHI’s price to recover alongside the other DeFi tokens.

SushiSwap distributes a fixed amount of newly produced SUSHI tokens to its liquidity providers every block. Prior to block 1085000, liquidity providers got SUSHI token rewards in proportion to the liquidity they provided.

Less than a day after SushiSwap rewards dropped from 1,000 tokens to 100 tokens per block, SushiSwap’s total value locked also plunged from $1.46 billion to $846.88 million, according to SushiSwap Protocol Analytics. However, the SUSHI token’s price only fell from $2.45 to $2.31 per token at press time, according to CoinGecko.

Uniswap, the original protocol of its hard fork Sushiswap, has now more total value locked (TVL) of $971.3 million, according to DeFi Pulse.

With the drop in Sushiswap’s total value locked, indicates that the liquidity providers on the platform were only interested in maximizing profits, rather than supporting the decentralized finance protocol. This move could question the intentions of the decentralized finance and yield the farming sector as a whole.

Crypto Exchange FTX Raises $900M in Series B Financing with a Market Cap valued at $18B

The famous American cryptocurrency exchange giant FTX.COM announced the completion of a $900 million Series B financing dedicated to expanding FTX’s international influence, expanding the company’s business, and aiming at becoming the top exchange worldwide within two years.

The financing amount is as high as $900 million, one of the biggest financings of a cryptocurrency company in history. After completing this financing, the company’s market value will reach $18 billion.

FTX Trading Ltd reveals there are 60 investors to get involved, including Paradigm, Sequoia Capital, Thoma Bravo, SoftBank, Ribbit Capital, Insight Partners, Third Point, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Altimeter, BOND, NEA, Coinbase Ventures, Willoughby Capital, 40North, Senator Investment Group, Sino Global Capital, Multicoin, the Paul Tudor Jones family, Izzy Englander, Alan Howard, VanEck, Hudson River Trading, and Circle.

29-year-old billionare and the CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried said:

“I’m incredibly humbled by the support we’ve gotten. It’s our first large fundraise, but through it we’ve formed a hugely valuable set of partners. I’m excited to work with them to make FTX the best company it can be. We started out as a new derivatives exchange two years ago, and this round will help us continue to build out a bigger and broader vision for what FTX could become.”

The FTX cryptocurrency exchange was founded in 2017, are a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange company with more than 1 million users and a daily trading volume of more than $10B. Since the launch of the FTX exchange to the general public in May 2019, FTX exchange has developed at a fantastic speed Growth, the company’s revenue this year has increased ten times.

The FTX exchange is currently the second-largest 24-hour open interest trading market worldwide after Binance in the crypto derivatives market, according to CoinGecko data.

Meanwhile, FTX is now the world’s fifth-biggest Bitcoin futures exchange, according to data from Skew.com. Many investors have favoured the impressive growth rate of the FTX Exchange. Previously, FTX Exchange has raised a total of $16M in funding over the last four rounds. The previous financing occurred on March 2, 2020. Leading investors include Binance and One Block Capital.

FTX CEO Spends 5 Hours per day to Deal with Regulatory Issues

FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried revealed he spends five hours a day to deal with regulatory and licensing of cryptocurrencies issues, according to a CNBC report Monday.

Speaking at a recorded interview with CNBC on-air Monday. The 29-year-old billionaire said the company is “applying for licenses in several jurisdictions right now”, spending time to deal with cryptocurrency regulations, indicating “the landscape is changing” and need to keep adapting amid the increased oversight from the global regulators.

“I think it’s probably a good solid five hours a day or so that I’m spending on everything from regulation to licensing and everything in between.”

Bankman-Fired said his Hong Kong-based crypto derivatives exchange firm tries to comply with various jurisdictions’ varying regulations. He implies the current legal challenge is due to the absence of clarity of laws.

Bankman-Fried also indicated that many regulators are finding out what the contexts for crypto derivatives should be like without combining this matter together. He expects to have more development to “arise in the coming three to five years by working together with regulators.”

Last month, FTX announced that the company had raised $900 million in series B financing, enabling the company’s market value to reach an estimated $18 billion. Bankman-Fried explained the majority of capital would be used for acquisition and expanding development.

FTX is now the world’s fifth-biggest Bitcoin futures exchange, according to data from Skew.com. FTX Exchange has raised a total of $16M in funding over the last four rounds. The previous financing occurred on March 2, 2020. Leading investors include Binance and One Block Capital.

FTX Cryptocurrency Exchange Launches a Marketplace for Selling and Buying NFTs

FTX, a popular cryptocurrency exchange in the US, has announced a launch of its NFT marketplace that aims to enable its users to create their own artworks and mint them as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) on the exchange, to be sold within its marketplace.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and CEO of FTX crypto exchange, talked about the news and stated that the company’s latest development offers the ability for people to mint NFTs directly on the exchange.

FTX, based in California, unveiled its NFT marketplace on Monday, September 6, as a move to allow people to create, display, and sell their works directly on the US exchange, as interest in the digital collectables continues surging.

Based on the development, Bankman-Fried tweeted: “Make your own NFTs.”

Generally, buying and selling NFTs does not come cheap, though. FTX plans to charge 5% to the buyer and the seller per sale – a 10% fee in total.

Currently, users can only store and view such NFTs within the exchange. However, FTX’s marketplace will be expanding to support deposits and withdrawals within a few weeks, allowing users to sell mainstream NFT projects on the exchange.

FTX clarified that users don’t have to be in the US to use the NFT marketplace. The CEO said the NFT marketplace can be used globally, with international users accessing both the crypto exchange and the NFT platform.

Bankman-Fried stated that payments for the NFTs would be cross-chain enabled between Solana and Ethereum. This means that the platform will allow trading tokens across both blockchains, executed using smart contracts or applications that can connect with two different chains.

By storing the NFT as information on a blockchain, it becomes almost impossible to remove or edit it, making it a permanent record of the owner’s purchase.

The NFT Boom

While most NFT trading volume conducts on the OpenSea marketplace, a rising number of cryptocurrency exchanges are beginning to realise that they can directly provide similar services to their millions of users.

FTX is the latest crypto exchange to announce the launch of its NFT marketplace.

In April, Binance cryptocurrency exchange launched its own NFT marketplace where users can create, buy, and sell digital collector’s items, popularly known as NFTs.

On September 2, the OKEx crypto exchange launched a new platform for minting and trading NFTs.

The demands for non-fungible tokens have significantly surged, with their sales soared to over 2 billion in the first quarter of 2021. That figure does not even account for the record-breaking $69 million NFT sold by digital artist Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) at Christie’s in March.

Crypto Exchange FTX Relocates its HQ to the Bahamas from Hong Kong

Digital assets derivatives exchange FTX has relocated their headquarter to Nassau, the Bahamas, from Hong Kong, citing fewer regulation restrictions in the country.

Online media Blockworks reported Thursday, citing 29-year-old billionaire FTX CEO and Founder Sam Bankman Fried, that the company has departed from Hong Kong and currently operate as Nassau-based in the Bahamas. Sam Bankman Friedindicated that “the proactive stance (was) taken by The Bahamas and its regulatory bodies on cryptocurrencies” is one of the primary reasons FTX is moving to the nation.

The official webpage of FTX has updated the latest headquarter in the Bahamas.

Reportedly, CEO of FTX Digital Markets Ryan Salame has moved to the Bahamas to lead the local business expansion on the Caribbean Sea Island. On Wednesday, Sam Bankman Fried celebrated along with Salame for the success of registration for the Bahamian subsidiary, FTX Digital Markets, which the Securities Commission of the Bahamas has registered as a digital assets business under the Digital Asset Registered Exchanges Bill or the “DARE Act,” according to the press-release.

In August, Sam Bankman Fried revealed that he needed to spend at least five hours per day dealing with regulatory issues. He also mentioned that the company was applying for licenses in several jurisdictions for operations during that time.

Hong Kong is considered one of the crypto-friendly regions running crypto businesses. It’s attracting more crypto businesses to settle down in Hong Kong recently. However, Hong Kong financial watchdogs continue to strengthen supervision with stricter regulations on crypto sectors and crackdowns on illegal crypto transactions and relative activities. Last month, the local regulator Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) had warned Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) are still unauthorized investment schemes yet. No issuer or firm is allowed to offer any proscribed investment options without proper registration with the commission.

Despite the stricter rules applying to crypto regulation, the period of quarantine due to the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak in the city could be the possible final straw that triggered the departure of the FTX.

Bankman-Fried has previously complained on Twitter that despite being fully vaccinated, he was delayed in June returning to Hong Kong because his Covid test result omitted his middle name.

FTX Completes $420M Series B-1 Funding Round at $25B Valuation

FTX Derivatives Exchange has completed a $420.69 million Series B-1 funding with participation from top investors.

As announced by the firm, these investors include the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, via its Teachers’ Innovation Platform, Temasek, Sequoia Capital, Sea Capital, IVP, ICONIQ Growth, Tiger Global, Ribbit Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock.

The funding round came just after the company raised $1 billion back in July 2021. Following this latest funding round, the Bahamas-based outfit has increased its valuation to $25 billion, further extending its position as a unicorn in the digital currency ecosystem. The company said it is going to deploy the new funds in expanding its product offerings and pushing forth into new markets globally. Ramnik Arora, Head of Product at FTX, said:

“The additional capital and group of investors will let us provide the experience our users deserve and address other adjacent market opportunities including equities, prediction markets, NFTs, and videogame partnerships. We expect to make strategic investments designed to grow the business and expand our regulatory coverage,”

While FTX has also had to adjust its operations in line with regulatory pressures globally, the company has inked several milestones that have positioned it on its next growth phase. Since its last funding round, the Sam Bankman-Fried led organization has established its headquarters in the Bahamas while also securing licenses under new regulatory frameworks in both the Bahamas and Gibraltar.

The firm is also strategic in its product offerings as it has floated an NFT marketplace, a growing trend amongst major digital currency exchanges today. Known for its Merger & Acquisition acquisitions, the company acquired Blockfolio through a record-breaking $150 million deal at the time, and its US affiliate, FTX.US, also acquired CFTC regulated clearinghouse, LedgerX.

While the company did not declare any plans to make any acquisition with the latest capital injection, doing so will not be out of place in its push to expand its reach in the industry.

FTX Shares 10-Point Regulatory Proposals to American Congress

One of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency trading platforms, FTX Derivatives Exchange, has published a 10-point regulatory proposal aimed at helping American regulators to provide better regulatory oversight of the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Contained in a Blog post dubbed “FTX’s Key Principles for Market Regulation,” the trading platform recommended that all aspects of the market, either spot or derivatives, should be brought under a single regulatory regime.

“In jurisdictions where there are two mature market regulators, FTX proposes the permissibility and adoption of a reasonable and rigorous framework that would allow a crypto-markets platform operator to elect one market regulator as its primary regulator for a unified spot and derivatives trading book, subject to adherence to a cooperative framework in which the other market regulator acts a secondary regulator while maintaining appropriate visibility into the platform’s operations, but not day-to-day supervisory responsibilities,” the proposal reads.

In the United States, there has been a significant confluence of regulatory showdowns between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Under the FTX proposal, either one or a newly appointed body will be responsible for taking over the regulations of the fast-growing digital ecosystem.

FTX also proposes a direct membership market structure, a model that will allow entities to perform regulated trades without the involvement of a third party. The trading platform wants oversight on asset custody, which will breed increased transparency amongst exchanges and their customers.

Rules on stablecoins issuers should require issuers to determine the standards they employ in permitting some coins over others, and these standards should be communicated to the public. FTX also proposes adequate reporting standards from cryptocurrency platforms to meet required regulatory provisions.

The set of proposals came ahead of the planned December 8 hearing wherein Chief Executive Officers of trading platforms will be made to testify before the House Committee on Finance as confirmed by the Committee Chairman, Maxine Waters.

The demand for clear regulations in the US has long been on the call. With the moves currently being championed by the regulators, a clear functional oversight will allegedly reposition the United States as the cradle of financial innovation in comparison to other global economies.

FTX US and DC Sports Leader MSE Establishes Multi-year Crypto Exchange, NFT Deals

Cryptocurrency exchange FTX USA announced on December 20 that it has become a cryptocurrency exchange and non-fungible token (NFT) partner with Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE).

FTX US will become the official encrypted partner of MSE’s Washington Capitals Hockey Team, Washington Wizards Men’s Basketball Team, Washington Mystery Women’s Basketball Team, and Capital Go-Go Basketball Team, while also gaining the exclusive right to drop future NFTs.

This cooperation is the first time that the leading American sports and entertainment family has entered the cryptocurrency industry.

Jim Van Stone, President of Business Operations and Chief Commercial Officer of MSE, commented on this cooperation that:

“The integration of blockchain technology with the sports experience has only just begun, and together we are going to advance to an entirely new frontier which will ignite fans beyond what they can even imagine today.”

FTX US hopes to provide a unique encrypted world experience for loyal sports fans in Washington, DC. Since then, the cooperation has not only become another step in the industry’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, but also an emerging power in the global sports world.

Earlier in October this year, FTX Derivatives Exchange completed a $420.69 million Series B-1 funding from top investors. The total valuation reached $25 billion.

On December 15, FTX Derivatives Exchange inked a global sponsorship deal with professional NBA basketball team Golden State Warriors, a move that will provide FTX brand presence throughout the team’s stadium known as the ‘Chase Center’.

Earlier as reported by Blockchain.News on August 24, The American cryptocurrency exchange giant FTX sponsors the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) with $17.5 million in cryptocurrency in exchange for getting the 10-year naming right of the California Memorial Stadium .