Uniswap growth lead Ashleigh Schap recently published an article by Yearn Finance founder Cronje criticizing forked protocols in the DeFi area. Schap described Yearn’s most recent merger with SushiSwap as confirmation of a “stolen DApp”.
Cronje’s Jan. 12 blog post, “Building in DeFi sucks,” complained about the risk that competitors could forge his code and combine it with attractive tokenomics to discourage users from the products he spent a lot of time building . He wrote:
“I can even build the superior product, but a competitor can simply fork off my code and an infinite coin token and it will have twice as many users in a week.”
This is exactly what happened when SushiSwap was branched off from Uniswap in late August 2020. The new project kicked off a domestic token and income farming program to successfully withdraw liquidity from Uniswap valued at more than $ 1 billion.
In early December 2020, Yearn Finance merged with SushiSwap and drew the ire of the Uniswap community. As such, the apparent hypocrisy of Cronje’s comments wasn’t lost on Uniswap’s growth lead, who tweeted:
“One of your complaints is that anyone can definitely steal your work. And yet YFI decides to partner with Sushi. When a legitimate Dapp validates a stolen Dapp buying partnership, they are only encouraging this type of behavior. “
Schap also targeted Cronje’s comments in which he referred to the notion of community within the crypto sector as “bullshit” alongside claims that “governance and community kill innovation.”
6 / Disagree at all that community is bullshit. Uniswap community and users evangelized Uniswap to be the largest dapp in Ethereum long before there was a token. The community’s incentive to need decentralized liquidity was sufficient.
– Ashleigh Schap (@ashleighschap) January 12, 2021
The thread sparked a debate in the crypto community in which Hasu called it “a rare look behind the scenes” at Uniswap headquarters. This revealed that the outfit sees SushiSwap as a “stolen DApp” that should be socially avoided.
FTX founder Sam Bankman Fried, who briefly took control of SushiSwap last year, defended the cloned protocol:
“That might be tough, but I think it is. Uniswap had a long time doing anything with their product. It wasn’t like that. This wasn’t Sushiswap copying brand new code in real time. It was practically in the public domain.”
Uniswap was able to regain its position as the leading DEX after the first liquidity vampire attack by SushiSwap in August by introducing its own rewards for indigenous tokens and liquidity farming. After UNI rewards ended in November, SushiSwap reclaimed its billion dollar TVL by offering yield incentives on the same pairings that Uniswap had previously used as an incentive.
In December, Yearn Finance announced a merger with SushiSwap to expand its expertise in developing ecosystems and pools. In total, Yearn adopted seven major DeFi protocols late last year, including SushiSwap, Deriswap, Cream Finance, Cover Protocol, Akropolis, Bounce Finance, and Pickle Finance.
