SUSHI token: What it is, why it matters, and the truth behind its rise and fall

When you hear SUSHI token, the native currency of SushiSwap, a decentralized exchange built to compete with Uniswap. Also known as SUSHI, it was once the poster child for DeFi’s wild west era—where communities could fork projects, reward users with tokens, and challenge giants overnight. It wasn’t just another crypto coin. It was a social experiment wrapped in code: give people tokens for providing liquidity, let them vote on where fees go, and watch the network grow—or collapse—by consensus.

The SUSHI token didn’t invent liquidity mining, but it turned it into a movement. In 2020, SushiSwap’s team took Uniswap’s code, added a token reward system, and distributed SUSHI to early users. Thousands jumped in. The price surged. People weren’t just trading—they were building a new kind of ownership. But here’s the twist: the same community that cheered the launch also turned on the team when the founder quietly cashed out. That moment didn’t kill SUSHI, but it changed how people see DeFi tokens forever. Today, SushiSwap, the decentralized exchange that still runs on the SUSHI token survives, but it’s no longer the hype machine it once was. And liquidity mining, the tactic of rewarding users with tokens for locking up crypto in pools—once the golden goose of DeFi—is now seen as a short-term trick, not a sustainable model.

What you’ll find in these posts isn’t just price charts or tokenomics. It’s the real stories behind tokens like SUSHI: the hype, the betrayal, the forgotten projects that tried to copy it, and the ones that learned from its mistakes. You’ll see how tokens with no real utility—like YOTO, PRZS, or KIT—tried to ride the same wave. You’ll read about how exchanges like Binance and HitBTC handled these tokens, and how scams like MoonDex exploited the confusion. You’ll also see how regulations, like those from Malta’s MFSA or the SEC, started closing the loopholes that let projects like SushiSwap rise so fast. This isn’t a history lesson. It’s a warning label wrapped in case studies. If you’re still chasing the next big memecoin or DeFi airdrop, you need to know what happened to SUSHI—and why it’s still the best example of what can go right, and very, very wrong.