bought SUSHI at $5.20 in 2021. wrote it off in 2023. pulled it up last week and it’s not the protocol i remembered.

march 2021. SUSHI hit its ATH of $23.38 on the 13th. i had bought a few weeks earlier at $5.20 because DeFi summer was still echoing and the xSUSHI fee share felt like the cleanest yield story in the space. staked the whole bag. felt smart.

by late 2022 i was down 80%+ on the token. the 0.05% fee share to xSUSHI stakers was real but it was patching a wound that was bleeding faster than the yield could keep up with. i stopped opening the app sometime in 2023. wrote it off mentally. moved on.

last week a friend mentioned Sushi launched on Solana and i thought wait, Sushi is still alive? pulled it up and spent an evening going through what they actually built while i wasn't looking. some of it surprised me, so i'm writing it down.

bear case first because it's real and it's most of the story.

token is down ~99% from the $23.38 ATH. it printed a new ATL of $0.1733 on Feb 6 2026 and is sitting around $0.20-$0.34 depending on the day. TVL went from over $8B in early 2022 to around $102M now , a 98.7% collapse. there was a governance vote on Dec 14 2025 where one wallet cast 99.9% of the voting power to push the annual emission rate from 1.5% to up to 5% of total supply. that's not decentralization, that's a multisig with extra steps. anyone holding from 2021 has been diluted into oblivion and the optics on the emissions vote were genuinely bad.

also worth noting: the protocol claims 2024 was their first profitable year with $10M+ in revenue across AMM, aggregator and adjacent products. AMBCrypto's tracking of 2025 quarterly numbers totals closer to $4.5M for the year. either Sushi is reporting fees and revenue together or 2025 was a serious step down. either way the trend isn't great.

ok. with all that on the table, here's what surprised me:

the protocol is on 40+ chains. while i was ignoring them, Sushi quietly became one of the most chain-agnostic DEXs in the space. on a bunch of newer L2s and alt-L1s, Sushi is the only major DEX deployed. you can argue that's a structural moat or you can argue it's desperation, but it's real footprint.

the Solana launch on Feb 9 2026 routes through Jupiter's Ultra API. that's a smart move. they're not trying to compete with Meteora or PumpSwap on Solana liquidity, they're plugging into Jupiter's routing and offering it inside the Sushi UI with cross-chain bridging between Solana and EVM in the same flow. that's the kind of integration that's actually useful instead of vanity.

Susa, their perps DEX on Layer N, launched a points program in April 2026. perps is where the volume and fees live. building one is a different bet than incremental AMM tweaks, and the timing is interesting given how much perps volume rotated to Hyperliquid and Aster in the last cycle.

new CEO Alex McCurry, Forbes 30 Under 30, founder of Synthesis, had his firm buy 10M+ SUSHI on the open market in december before he took the role. roughly $3.34M at the price they paid. you can argue $3.34M is small relative to what Sushi used to be, but it's not zero and it's not a salary play. former CEO Jared Grey transitioned to an advisory role on Dec 1 2025.

so here's where i actually land, which is somewhere uncomfortable: the protocol has been quietly executing. the token has been getting wrecked by dilution and a governance structure that doesn't inspire trust. these are not the same thing and it took me an evening of digging to separate them in my head.

i'm not buying more. the dilution math at 5% AER doesn't work for me as a holder, even if revenue doubles, the per-token value barely moves if supply keeps expanding at that rate. but i did move SUSHI out of the "dead bag" mental folder into "watching what they ship next" , specifically Susa volume and whether the new emissions translate to sticky TVL or just sit in mercenary pools and leave.

genuinely curious what other long-term holders think. is the protocol/token disconnect a real opportunity or am i talking myself into a sunk cost reframe? and for anyone who exited fully, what would actually make you look again?