Sushi's New Head Chef Faces Scrutiny Over a Checkered Past

Sushiswap has installed a new Head Chef, and the appointment has not gone smoothly.

After twelve turbulent months, the arrival of Jared Grey was meant to steady a protocol that started life as a "community fork" of Uniswap. Instead, attention has quickly shifted to questions about who was actually hired.

It has been a difficult stretch for Sushi. Maki was pushed out of the project, Delong departed abruptly, and Sesta's attempt to merge operations collapsed alongside the Sifu scandal. When the team subsequently unveiled a restructuring roadmap, the community reacted angrily to the pay package proposed for the incoming Head Chef role.

The compensation terms were later rewritten, Grey was voted in, and Goldentree — one of the two whale wallets that delivered his winning vote — announced a $5 million investment shortly after.

For a moment, Sushi's trajectory looked to be improving. A celebratory tweet introducing Grey told followers to "stay tuned for Jared's next steps." The timing mattered: Sushi is rumoured to be preparing new stablecoin-swap pools, making renewed scrutiny of its leadership especially unwelcome.

Instead of looking ahead, the project is now confronting Grey's history with earlier ventures — history that surfaced almost as soon as his appointment was made public.

Amid a wave of exaggerated and unverified claims circulating online, several more grounded concerns risk being brushed aside.

When Grey's new role was announced, one reply referenced an alleged connection to the collapse of Encore Finance — a comment that drew little attention at first. A week later, however, a detailed thread posted by YannickCrypto compiling Grey's project history began circulating more widely.

The oldest complaint tied to Grey dates to 2012, years before he entered crypto: an archived blog post accused him of copyright infringement over advertising materials produced for Multiplex PC, and described questionable marketing tactics used by the firm. Grey's explanation at the time was that the relevant email account "had been hijacked some time ago."

Fast forward to 2019: Grey became CEO of ALQO, not long before the project's Liberio wallet went live. That wallet was later used to siphon user funds through private keys accessible to a member of the team. The episode was documented on Bitcointalk at the time, including comments from Grey minimizing its significance.

This is the sole allegation — aside from the horse-themed jabs making the rounds — that Grey has addressed publicly, stating that a business partner had stolen funds from the community while Grey himself was occupied raising capital to launch the Bitfineon exchange, and that once he and investors discovered this, the partner was fired and affected users were reimbursed.

The Medium postmortem Grey points to was published in November 2019 — eight months after the issue was first flagged publicly — and states that lead developer Kevin Collmer delayed or refused to share the source code, and that he alone had built and architected the Liberio wallet.

Whether or not Grey bears direct responsibility for the theft, the situation raises an obvious question: what kind of CEO allows wallet software to reach users with no oversight at all? Being occupied with fundraising is a thin justification. The following year, ALQO rebranded as EONS and migrated to Ethereum, and the episode faded from public view.

Additional, less substantiated claims from 2020 also link Grey to EnCore and Bitfineon.

Grey has had a hand in each of these ventures, and each has drawn allegations of mismanagement of some kind. Some accusations carry more weight than others, but their sheer volume alone justifies closer examination. There may be legitimate explanations for all of it, but responding to scrutiny by dismissing it outright — rather than addressing specifics — only feeds crypto Twitter's rumor cycle, while letting the more absurd claims overshadow the credible ones.

Reputational questions aside, it is striking that after such a chaotic year, Sushi's vetting process apparently failed to surface any of this about its Head Chef candidate. rekt contacted the Sushi team to ask about its due-diligence process and received no response.

The Sushi community appears to be waving this through with little scrutiny — possibly numbed by a year of near-constant turmoil. Sushiswap has played a significant role in DeFi's history, and it would be unfortunate to watch the project fade out now. Here's hoping this latest bet doesn't turn into another misstep.