DeFi Protocol Sushi Lays Out 2023 Plans With Focus on DEX and User Experience

Popular decentralized-finance (DeFi) application Sushi’s CEO laid out the protocol’s 2023 roadmap with focus on user experience and said Sushi will release its decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator in the first quarter.

The protocol will focusing heavily on DEX products this year, as part of its previous broader plans toward making the protocol sustainable and profitable. “Ultimately, we will provide deep liquidity, optimal pricing, sustainable tokenomics, & an easy-to-use platform, placing you first in everything we build,” CEO Jared Grey said in a blog post on Monday.

The move comes after Sushi’s chief technology officer, Matthew Lilley, said in a tweet thread on Jan. 3 that two of its products – the Kashi lending platform and MISO, a launchpad for external tokens – would be shuttered because of low public interest and the significant effort that went into maintaining the two. Lilley said Sushi developers would focus more on the protocol’s DEX product.

“Our goal is to become a market-leading DEX by improving our product stack & delivering feature parity to provide a firm foundation enabling innovation, like biased LP routes via our aggregation router & concentrated liquidity coming in Q1,” Grey said in the new blog post.

Sushi was created as a copy of Uniswap with added liquidity mining and governance features. SushiSwap, the DEX, had over $457.8 million in locked token value as of Tuesday, according to DefiLlama data. Some $329.6 million of that is locked on Ethereum-based assets.

SushiSwap (SUSHI), the native token of the SushiSwap decentralized exchange, has risen about 36% this year, compared to Ethereum’s native token ether (ETH), which has climbed 33%, according to CoinDesk data.

Grey said that Sushi built its DEX aggregation router in “stealth mode” during 2022 which will “help deliver the best user experience by serving users with optimal pricing.” DEX aggregation connects many decentralized exchanges’ liquidity pools, helping to provide traders better price and liquidity. Some of the top DEX aggregators include 1inch, OpenOcean and ParaSwap.

Sushi is also expecting to launch its decentralized incubator – Sushi Studios – which will license the brand to launch independently-funded projects to support ecosystem growth without burdening the DAO treasury, Grey said in the blog.

Grey, who was formerly CEO of DeFi platform EONS and CEO at crypto exchange Bitfineon, was voted by the Sushi community in October 2022, to be the CEO. Grey told CoinDesk at that time that he hoped to bolster engagement on the platform and improve the exchange’s internal organization.