SushiSwap

SushiSwap is a decentralized exchange: you swap tokens from your own wallet against pools of liquidity, with no account and no custodian. It launched in August 2020 as a copy of Uniswap's code with one change that mattered, a token. Liquidity providers were paid in SUSHI on top of swap fees, an early example of using a token to attract liquidity from an existing exchange.

Sushi's own docs say the project was started by an anonymous developer called "Chef Nomi", who withdrew funds meant for development and later returned them after a backlash. Today the brand is simply Sushi. The website's cookie notice and the Blade documentation both name Sushi Labs as the company behind the product. Sushi does not publish the legal entity's registration or address in a form we could read, and its terms of service page did not load as text.

The SUSHI token governs the DAO. Holders vote on Snapshot in SUSHIPOWAH, which counts SUSHI in the SUSHI-ETH pool double and SUSHI held as xSUSHI once. Proposals need a quorum of 5 million. The docs say a core team handles day-to-day operations and protocol changes, while the community votes on structural changes, tokenomics and use of the development fund.

Sushi has two layers. The first is its own pools. The V2-style constant-product pools spread liquidity across every price. The V3-style concentrated-liquidity pools let providers choose a price range. A newer V4 set of contracts is also listed in its docs.

The second is the aggregator. When you swap on sushi.com, an off-chain engine called Tines searches pools across many exchanges for the best route, and a RouteProcessor contract carries it out on-chain. The latest, RP9, was announced in September 2025 with V4 support, and a "Red Snwapper" contract sits in front as the entry point. Your trade may therefore fill on another exchange's pools rather than Sushi's.

Blade, announced in October 2025, is a different design built for major assets such as ETH, WBTC and stablecoins. It prices trades off-chain from exchange price feeds and proves them on-chain. Sushi says Blade earns from arbitrage rather than swap fees and avoids impermanent loss. Its docs say it was built by Shipyard Software under Sushi Labs.

On a classic V2-style pool, a swap costs 0.30% of the trade. Sushi's tokenomics page says 0.05% of that is used to buy SUSHI on the market for xSUSHI stakers, which leaves 0.25% for liquidity providers. Concentrated-liquidity pools have their own fee tiers, set per pool. Sushi's docs do not publish a full table, and the aggregator's own charge, if any, is not set out in the docs we checked.

You also pay the gas fee of whichever chain you trade on. DefiLlama counts about $569,000 in fees over the past 30 days, on about $244 million of volume.

Sushi runs on a long list of chains, and its supported-chains page is built live from the aggregator's endpoint rather than written down. As of October 2026 DefiLlama counts deposits on Ethereum, Stellar, Polygon, Katana, Arbitrum, Robinhood Chain, Base, Boba, Gnosis, Rootstock, Hemi, BNB Chain, Filecoin, Celo, OP Mainnet and Arbitrum Nova. Recent launches on its blog include Plasma (September 2025), Kadena (October 2025) and Stellar (February 2026).

There is no sign-up. Sushi's terms of service would not render as readable text when we checked, so this page does not list which countries it restricts. Blade's FAQ says any wallet not on the US sanctions (OFAC) list can provide liquidity.

Sushi's pools are non-custodial, but its security page is thin. It says Sushi "regularly engages with top-tier auditors" without naming them or linking reports. It runs a bug bounty on Immunefi and points to GoPlus for token risk checks. The DAO's development fund needs four of six Treasury Council signatures, and operational changes need at least three signatures on an operations multisig.

The incident readers most often ask about is the April 2023 router exploit. DefiLlama records a missing input check in the RouteProcessor2 contract that let an attacker take about $3.3 million from wallets that had approved that router. The attack did not break the pools. Approvals stay live until you remove them, so it is worth checking and revoking old token approvals, including for Sushi routers you no longer use.

• Approval risk: aggregator routers need spending approvals, and a flawed router can misuse them.
• Thin pools: with about $96 million spread over many chains, many pools are shallow and large trades move the price.
• Unknown tokens: anyone can create a pool, so check the token contract address.
• Impermanent loss for liquidity providers, especially in concentrated ranges.

Several facts that readers of a company page usually expect are not published by Sushi in a form we could check today: a named list of audits with dates, the legal entity's registration and address, the country restrictions in its terms, and the identities of the multisig signers. None of that means the contracts are unsafe. It does mean that a user relies more on Sushi's track record and on public on-chain data than on documents. In DefiLlama's records, for example, the largest loss tied to Sushi, in 2023, came from a router contract rather than from the pools.

Go to sushi.com, connect a wallet such as MetaMask, pick the chain, and swap. The interface shows the route and the minimum you will receive. To provide liquidity, choose a pool and deposit both tokens. V2-style pools give you LP tokens, while concentrated pools give you a position NFT.

To leave, remove liquidity from the pool page, which returns both tokens plus earned fees, then revoke the approvals you no longer need. xSUSHI can be unstaked back to SUSHI. For a wider view of trading costs, see how SushiSwap compares with other decentralized exchanges.

Dates come from Sushi's docs and blog, with incidents from DefiLlama.

• August 2020: SushiSwap launches as a Uniswap fork with the SUSHI token.
• April 2023: RouteProcessor2 exploit, about $3.3 million.
• September 2025: Route Processor 9 with V4 support; launch on Plasma.
• October 2025: launch on Kadena; Blade announced.
• February 2026: launch on the Stellar network.