$SUSHI Price Doubles After Creator Shifts Control To FTX CEO

In Brief
SushiSwap's creator has handed control to the CEO of FTX.
The CEO plans to devolve power to the community.
Chef Nomi, SushiSwap's creator, is now a controversial figure within the community.
Chef Nomi, the pseudonymous creator of the Uniswap-like DeFi protocol, today transferred his control to the CEO of crypto exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried.

Nomi had angered the SushiSwap community by withdrawing $13 million from $SUSHI's liquidity pool on decentralized exchange Uniswap. The community, as well as the General Manager of SushiSwap, 0xMaki, turned on him and alleged that he had pulled an exit-scam—something Nomi denied. Then Nomi went to sleep.

Finally awake and forced to confront the mounting outrage, Nomi gave the admin keys to Bankman-Fried, who two hours prior had tweeted: "Nomi sucks and hurt the community," and "If Nomi doesn't step down, it's over for Sushi."

Bankman-Fried thanked Nomi for giving him the keys and laid out his plans for SushiSwap. He said he will devolve power to the community once more by transferring control to a multi-sig address controlled by leaders elected by the community. "After that -- Sushi shall be back in the community's hands," he tweeted.

Nomi said in a tweet after transferring control: "I hope SushiSwap does well without me. Again I did not intend to do any harm. I'm sorry if my decision did not follow what you expected. But I want to stress again and I did not intend to scam anyone. No LPs are lost whatsoever. I kept all my promises."

The token price of $SUSHI spiked after the announcement from $1.24 to highs of $3, per metrics site CoinMarketCap. But many still harbor ill against Chef Nomi and wonder whether he will return the $12 million he withdrew from Uniswap.

Andre Cronje, founder of yEarn, a major DeFi protocol, tweeted: "Are you leaving the project? If so, are you giving the dev funds back? All you did so far was hand over a token that was built off of UniswapProtocol. Weren't the funds meant to further develop? Aren't you that developer?"