Sushi CTO Joseph Delong on building defi protocols

In this episode of UpOnly, Cobie & Ledger are back and talk to Joseph Delong about building Sushi, working in a DAO, the state of the ecosystem, L2 and alt-L1 expansion, open source, and more.

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Show Notes

Joe’s Day

 ⁃ Was up late last night triaging bugs

 ⁃ Missed his Denver trip to say what’s up to the homies soon

 ⁃ Lots of crypto spots in Denver

Joe’s Background

 ⁃ Studied comp sci and math

 ⁃ Worked on ETH 2, Beacon chain

 ⁃ Then joined Sushi

Sushi

 ⁃ All comms through TG and Discord

 ⁃ 24 team members

 ⁃ Cobie: “So how do you guys find team members?”

 ⁃ Joe: “That’s almost all I do is like shitpost on Twitter and find people to hire there”

 ⁃ How to hire solidity devs when they could join a different project at the ground floor?

 ⁃ Sushi offers high incentives – also kinda hard to build a lasting project, people wanna join Sushi

Met Gala

 ⁃ Cobie is sending Gainzy and Loomdart to the Met Gala next year

Military

 ⁃ Joe worked on a plane in the military

 ⁃ Realized every else also doesn’t know what’s going on at any given time

 ⁃ Joe: “I was working on a jet and asked the supervisor do we need to change parts here? and he shrugged like… idk man” lol

Working at a DAO

 ⁃ It’s harder to work at than a normal company

 ⁃ The crypto anarchism leaks into the workplace which can be tough for internal work dynamics

Sushi Chain Agnostic

 ⁃ Ethereum community calls like everything else a scam, Avalanche scam, BSC scam, everything scam

 ⁃ Sushi doesn’t think like that, they’re pretty chain agnostic

 ⁃ Want to go where they can add the most value

Open Source

 ⁃ Joe: “We don’t have any shame about pulling in particular software, I mean that’s what open source is all about”

 ⁃ Sushi has good meme power, accepted as a blue chip and has the community to back you up

 ⁃ Joe: “We’re going to give back everything that was given to us. Everything we write is going to be GPL 3”

 ⁃ Ledger shows very cool huge brain about rules

CT Beef

 ⁃ Ledger: “Is the moral of the story that Uni hates Sushi?”

 ⁃ Joe: “I mean I fcking hate ‘em”

 ⁃ Joe: “They try to say we only forked, we have our own code base”

 ⁃ Cobie: “This isn’t like fake beef this is like blood lust lol”

NFTs Memed Into Reality

 ⁃ Selling 2007 Kia Sedonas

 ⁃ Joe laughed his ass off when he saw this — so many people flexing maseratis or lambos

 ⁃ The 2007 Kia Sedona is so specific its so funny

 ⁃ Cobie: “Are you guys gonna sweep the floor of real life Kia Sedonas”

 ⁃ Joe: “We definitely have at least 1”

 ⁃ Joe: “They’re on Sushi – you can redeem the token 1:1 for the NFTs”

Sushi NFT Marketplace

 ⁃ Cobie: “Has Sushi been working on an OpenSea competitor in the wake of Nate“

 ⁃ Joe: “Yes working on _____” missed the name but yes they are working on this in some form

Sushi on L2s?

 ⁃ Joe: “Yeah definitely, specifically Arbitrum. As we roll out Trident that’ll add a lot of capital efficiency as well”

 ⁃ Sushi: Ethereum, arbitrum, fantom, polygon, harmony, avalanche, selom (?)… sir talked to fast i missed the other 10 chains they are on

Charles Hoskinson

 ⁃ Joe: “His profile picture for a long time was him in traditional Mongolian cloth like holding a falcon”

 ⁃ Maybe should spend more time on chain less time on YouTube

 ⁃ But maybe not! Cardano is sitting at marketcap #3 lol

NFTs on L2

 ⁃ We can’t move them off because then we’d burn less ETH!

 ⁃ Ethereum burning like $1bn of market cap per month rn

 ⁃ Joe: “We will basically all be transacting completely on L2s — transacting on L1s will be a huge flex”

Chef Nomi

 ⁃ Joe was not there during the Sushi pull

 ⁃ Larry from The Block is on the multi-sig

 ⁃ SBF was early on Sushi its basically a Sam coin

Most Likely Satoshi Nakamoto

 ⁃ Hal Finney

 ⁃ He was in cryptography, cypher punk groups

2 Ethereum Smart Contract Devs Fight

 ⁃ Nick Johnson vs. Mudit Gupta

 ⁃ Cobie: “Good question ledger” hahaha

Elite Projects

 ⁃ Arbitrum

 ⁃ Not many others off the top of the head

What’s Missing From DeFi?

 ⁃ A really liquid options market

 ⁃ A better UX

 ⁃ Will likely be like Web2

 ⁃ Hopefully a mobile only experience

Final Alpha (courtesy of Luke)

“Regardless of whether it’s a DAO or a company, there’s almost nothing new under the sun in terms of human relationships. It’s a nice expectation to have, even if you’re in a DAO it doesn’t mean it changes the dynamic of how people”

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle