Recently, the SushiSwap community voted on a proposal that signaled support for transferring nearly the entirety of the treasury from the DAO to a ‘Labs’ entity. Sushigov.eth, the operational multisig for SushiSwap, voted for the first time in a governance proposal, voting ‘Yay’ with 5.5 million SUSHIPOWER, the largest individual voter, and approximately 30% of the votes in favor.
Recently, sushigov.eth received significant quantities of Sushi, including approximately 1.9 million on April 4, from 0x4bb4c1B0745ef7B4642fEECcd0740deC417ca0a0, an address that resolves to *🍣👨🍳.eth. It also received an additional 1.78 million Sushi on April 3, as well as two additional deposits of 1.9 million and 1.8 million from that same address.
This signal vote passed by a margin of approximately 8 million votes.
Sushi’s restructuring
This is the latest step in what’s become a years-long effort for the oft-controversial Sushi organization to restructure itself. Since then, Sushi has deleted or privated discussion of these changes on its governance forum.
In 2022, the Sushi community voted to begin restructuring and, as part of this process, received advice from law firm Fenwick & West.
The following year, Sushi launched a new proposal noting that it intended to switch its legal advice from Fenwick & West to Gresham International. The forum discussion of this change is also no longer available but a review of archives reveals a community note in which a user claims that they have “been in the legal industry most of my career and I’ve never heard of Gresham. So I’m not sure they are a leading international firm.”
Jared Grey, Sushi’s ‘head chef,’ defended the decision by noting that Gresham International “worked with many projects in the space” and further added that Fenwick’s proposal “wasn’t sufficient to meet the needs of the DAO.”
Gresham International’s website does note several projects it has worked for in the space, including RadioShack, as well as less well-known firms like CryptoCammel mining, ArabChain, Quantum Kingdom of Zululand, and Africunia Bank (note: this does not seem to be a bank but an initial coin offering).
Read more: SushiSwap team wants to kill DAO to benefit themselves
Gresham International also includes many awards it has won, including:
- ‘Top Speaker,’ which was awarded by Global Genesis 2019 to Cal Evans, the managing associate for the firm. A brief search didn’t return any coverage of this award besides that on Gresham International’s website.
- ‘Crypto Lawyer of the Year,’ which was awarded by WBS 2021, again to Evans. A brief search again failed to return any mention of this award besides on Gresham International’s website.
- ‘Blockchain Lawyer of the Year’ was awarded by AIBC 2022 — another award seemingly mentioned only on Gresham’s own website.
- ‘Law Firm of the Year,’ which was awarded by Corporate Excellence 2022.
Cal Evans told Protos, “Each organization and event has their own voting and determination mechanism. If you are in the crypto space you will be familiar with AIBC and WBS as two of the biggest events in the industry. Although I do believe that the ‘Crypto Law Firm of the Year’ was obtained through a PR Agency we worked with.”
Evans added, “In the whole world of the good news that Sushi has produced over the last few weeks, it’s strange you would focus on Gresham’s and the team’s ‘website awards’ and not ask questions about Sushi.”
Protos had asked whether or not Gresham International had advised Sushi on the recent movement of assets from the DAO to the new Labs entities, to which Evans responded, “We cannot comment on any work that we undertake for clients as a matter of privacy.”
Gresham International’s Gitbook notes that a project it previously worked with, Aubit, had significant problems, including “criminal activities.” However, it also noted that Aubit “switched to their own in-house team and the use of other third party counsel for some years since our engagement.”
This is followed by another post related to a lawsuit that named Gresham. The firm noted, “As Gresham US is a company that has worked with Wyoming and its legislature, we are aware that Wyoming is forward thinking and we consider the state to be a friend of Gresham International. We have no doubt that a Jury and Judge will see this lawsuit for what it is and who the parties involved are.”
Currently, the implementation vote to continue the movement of assets from the DAO to the Labs entity currently has approximately 99% ‘Yay’ votes, including, of course, sushigov.eth.
