A TASTE FOR LIQUIDITY.
From 28 August to 9 September 2020, SushiSwap turned token rewards into a challenge to Uniswap's liquidity. The new exchange borrowed Uniswap's open-source design and offered SUSHI incentives to participating liquidity providers. The strategy became known as a vampire attack: a rival attracting the assets that enabled an established market's trades.
The invitation began with pool shares. Providers who supplied assets to Uniswap received liquidity-provider tokens, or LP tokens, representing claims on their pools. They could stake eligible tokens in SushiSwap's MasterChef contract to earn SUSHI. At first, the trading liquidity remained on Uniswap while these ownership receipts were committed to SushiSwap's program.
On 9 September, migration began. Deposited Uniswap LP tokens were redeemed for underlying assets to supply new SushiSwap pools; new LP tokens replaced the old claims. Participants had chosen to stake for this migration. The vampire label described incentives and a movement of liquidity, rather than a hack or theft.
The illustration gives that invitation a welcoming face. An attractive, fictional vampire chef turns liquidity mining into a restaurant pitch. The unicorn jar recalls Uniswap and card 049, the LP SHARES receipt makes a digital claim tangible, and the SUSHI REWARDS menu presents the inducement. A smiling fang charm completes the joke.
Generous rewards could attract deposits quickly; retaining providers was a separate challenge. Sushi's later retrospective acknowledged that some reward-seeking farmers moved on. A TASTE FOR LIQUIDITY captures this moment of temptation and competition, when an extra token reward could help a new exchange recruit participants from an existing market.
Sources & the artist’s interpretation
Sources: CoinDesk migration report, 9 September 2020 ; SushiSwap MasterChef V1 source code ; Uniswap v2 pool-token documentation ; Sushi tokenomics retrospective, 7 November 2023 . The chef and props are fictional metaphors, not a portrait of Chef Nomi or a historical scene. The 2023 source supplies retrospective context; its later tokenomics proposal is not depicted. A TASTE FOR LIQUIDITY is original editorial copy. No endorsement or financial advice is implied.
