SushiSwap has been plagued with infighting, management issues and product delays. Roughly two years ago, when the project launched, it was DeFi’s darling on the back of the “community-owned” narrative. At its peak, the DEX had over $7B of TVL (Nov. 2021), but that figure has drawn down to ~$700M thanks to stronger competition and crypto prices declining.

Over the last year, activity on SushiSwap has been dwindling per various metrics.

Let’s start off by looking at pool creation, a proxy for how much demand there is to add liquidity for new assets. Pool creation has slowed to a crawl across various networks compared to a year ago.

The number of traders and liquidity providers on Sushi has also shrunk drastically within the same period, down over 60% and 70% year-on-year respectively.

On the surface, these optics are hardly surprising. After all, crypto is experiencing a “bear market.” Most DeFi tokens are down over 90% since their peak and ETH alone is down 70% from its all-time-high. Along with the crypto market capi