SushiSwap Lost 98.7% of Its TVL. It Didn't Die. Here's What the Surviving Team Built.
SushiSwap did not die in 2023. The project came closer to death than most observers knew: losing governance coordination, community confidence, and nearly all of its $8 billion total value locked. But by late 2025, quietly rebuilt itself under new management and with a multi-chain architecture keeping the protocol live on over a dozen networks. This is the story of how. It's not so much about a dramatic bailout as it is about incremental infrastructure upgrades made during the worst of times that kept the protocol from dying completely.
If you've been paying attention to sushiswap news over the past few years, the interesting story wasn't the downfall. It was what this resilient squad built behind the scenes while the market slept. Because while this distinction may seem trivial, the DeFi world is full of projects that boomed in 2021 and slowly faded into obscurity. To outside observers, Sushi's experience was no different. But inside the project, small teams were making engineering decisions that would decide if the sushiswap app stayed alive in 2026. Now those bets are starting to pay off.
Growing Pains: The Treasury Depleted and DAO Splintered
Digging deeper, though, this was when things truly hit crisis mode. By mid-2023, SushiSwap's governance had effectively stalled the protocol. The treasury was depleted, major collaborators were exiting the project, forks of the protocol were publicly split on rudimentary spending decisions, and what little remained of the DAO couldn't agree on even basic objectives. These fractures were no secret to external observers. TVL had plunged from its all-time high of $8 billion in 2022 to just a fraction of that. And daily volume, which eclipsed $860 million at its peak in midsummer, continued its precipitous descent. Operating expenses outpaced revenue generation.
Rather explicitly showcasing this chaos, the sushi coin price consistently trended downward as trust exited the ecosystem. But what truly defined this moment as existential was the lack of governance. DAOs rely on token holders showing initiative and leadership units agreeing on a north star; SushiSwap had neither of those in spades. Proposals went unchanged. Roadmaps fell by the wayside. What was once a chatty Sushi community went silent. Many high-profile collaborators even shared their two cents on whether the Sushi protocol even had a future. That proverbial silence told you all you needed to know about how close to death the project truly was.
The inflection point wasn't marked by fireworks or theatrics. It arrived quietly through infrastructure projects many token holders ignored.
Three Engineering Choices That Kept SushiSwap Running
The first choice was architectural in nature: retaining multi-chain deployments as all other resources were forced to contract. Other ailing protocols may have consolidated liquidity to Ethereum mainnet in a fit of cost-cutting, but Sushi's skeleton crew of engineers kept the sushiswap app deployed to its existing chains. This required picking routing smart contracts apart, updating router logic, and securing liquidity routing across all of those chains where trading activity had slowed to nearly nothing. It wasn't glamorous work, but someone had to do it.
The second major choice was made around SushiSwap's aggregation layer. Over the course of Sushi's life cycle, the Sushi protocol had transformed itself from an AMM into a DEX aggregator, sourcing liquidity from a variety of venues and routing trades using its smart order routing engine to ensure users got the best prices possible. The forces behind the protocol through the bear market dust-up continued improving smart order routing logic on SushiSwap, improving execution quality on the protocol in the face of diminishing liquidity. The thinking was straightforward: if Sushi couldn't compete on pure liquidity, perhaps it could instead compete on smart routing.
Finally, team leaders made the decision to tighten the belts. Sushi's treasury was not healthy, and with an inability to self-fund development work, the team members who remained took reduced pay and prioritized security audits over flashy new features. Development slowed precipitously. Product launches ground to a halt. There was barely any sushiswap news to excite traders. From the outside, it looked and felt like stagnation. Inside the team, it was triage.
By the time community members coalesced into a new leadership group in late 2025, the foundational components of SushiSwap were secure, audited, and stable on its multitude of network deployments. SushiSwap's app didn't grow during this period. It just survived, which was an impressive feat for any DeFi project post-2023.
What $101 Million in TVL Actually Represents
Before digging into SushiSwap's current liquidity situation, it's important to note where we're coming from. SushiSwap managed $7.87 billion of total value locked at its peak in late 2022. It currently stands at $101.79 million. That's a 98.7% decline. Even for crypto, that's drastic.
While that headline number is eye-popping enough on its own, it's worth looking at the big picture. Between December 2022 and December 2025, daily traded volume on Sushi sank from $915 million to $21 million, a decline of roughly 98%. When reporting on those figures, it's important to remember context. The collapse was across the entire DeFi industry. TVL has been compressed as the crypto market crunched down, with most projects down 80-95% or more from their all-time highs. SushiSwap has underperformed relative to that median, yes. However, since hitting its bottom, total value locked on the protocol has not continued toward zero. It has stabilized at this new level.
These numbers right now aren't recovery numbers. They're floor numbers. There's a big distinction there for potential investors wondering if now is the time to buy sushiswap tokens.
The price of Sushi token on the DEX currently sits at around $0.54, down over 78% from the $2.40 peak in December 2024. Projected price target predictions expect sushi price to reach $0.97 by the end of 2025, $2.43 average by 2028, and $4.04 average by 2031. Those numbers are still predicated on crypto markets finding upward momentum. What's most important to know about the sushiswap price is whether the infrastructure investments translate into real activity on the protocol. Whether price increases follow that momentum is secondary to whether the incentives around SushiSwap actually create one in the first place.
McCurry Bets Big: Sushi Gets a Leader
The bet got extra attention because it came complete with one of the highest-profile declarations of leadership since the DAO drama unfolded. McCurry, founder of Synthesis, bought over 10 million SUSHI tokens on Dec. 1, 2025, granting himself the largest effective control of the Sushi protocol's roadmap. In many ways, it was a cryptocurrency community coming back to SushiSwap that hadn't been seen for years: a visible and singular leader who had bet big bucks on himself. Purchased at low value, McCurry's stash of SUSHI was a concentrated wager that the Sushi exchange's foundational tech had value exceeding present market prices.
The protocol that McCurry now leads by fiat and by history spans multiple chains. That reality is at once SushiSwap's biggest opportunity and its biggest technical roadblock. Deploying on multiple blockchains means running a dozen separate deployments. There's technical overhead in dealing with fractional liquidity spread across chains. Additionally, there's a product design challenge in keeping user experience steady across the sushiswap app even as individual traders may want to use different chains. This means the Sushi network also touches more potential users than any competitor operating on a single chain.
Including SushiSwap on Coinbase International's roster of perpetual futures markets in July 2025 sent a signal that exchanges catering to high-profile, institutional customers typically don't send to projects they believe to be dying. Traders could now use those perpetual contracts to speculate on the price of sushi crypto indirectly, and the SUSHI token branded itself back into the wary awareness of corners of the professional trading world that had completely checked SushiSwap off their list.
Survival Isn't Rebuild: Why Sushi's Revival Matters Heading into 2026
The sushi exchange isn't a rebuild narrative, yet. The charts won't justify that headline. TVL across SushiSwap's DeFi ecosystem currently hovers at approximately 1.3% of its all-time high. Trading volume reflects a similar pattern. The sushiswap price trades at similarly debilitating discounts to levels you'd expect if market participants at large had reason to believe broader crypto markets were poised for a sustained recovery.
At the same time, what the data does show, and what some are starting to extrapolate given small upticks in network activity, tells a different story. One that might be more instructive for DeFi enthusiasts looking beyond 2024: a DeFi protocol can emerge from near-total ruin if infrastructure decisions made prior to the collapse were sound, and if a sufficiently capitalized party is willing to step up to salvage the project just before the last lights go out.
That precedent won't apply to every struggling protocol facing similarly bleak circumstances, but the DeFi ecosystem entering next year will be in a period of heightened consolidation. Every incumbent protocol that managed to survive the 2023-2024 shakeout will enjoy structural advantages over newly launched projects. From battle-tested smart contracts and established multi-chain presence to SushiSwap's specific advantage as an aggregation layer whose logic has been stress-tested during the worst-case scenario.
Some people looking to buy sushi sushi tokens today are buying a growth narrative. They're wagering that sushi coin and the price of SUSHI will retrace their old price movements over the coming months. McCurry is buying optionality on a protocol that decided, quite simply, not to go quietly into the night just because every metric indicated it probably should have. Whether McCurry and team can flip this optionality back into positive price action remains to be seen.
The sushi bar for success isn't $8 billion in TVL. It's sustainable trade volume and whatever proof-of-stake fees swap aggregators can generate. The first metrics to pay attention to on that front will have to do with how SushiSwap performs off Ethereum. Two years prior, prevailing thought amongst crypto publications was that SushiSwap had finally met its destiny as a cautionary tale about the dangers of DAO governance and just how vulnerable forked protocols can really be. That assumption was never wrong about the failures. It was wrong about what came after.
