What's Driving Token Prices? December 3, 2025

SUSHI (-6.9%) - On Monday, Jared Grey, the “Head Chef” of Sushiswap, announced he would step down from running the decentralized exchange. Grey stepped into the role over three years ago, when Sushiswap was undergoing a massive leadership and personnel shift and had largely been abandoned. Alex McCurry of Synthesis will now head the project. Synthesis, which describes itself as a “tech-focused crypto capital fund and defi engineering team,” made a significant capital investment in Sushiswap to fund ongoing operations. Sushiswap rose to fame in 2020 when it “vampire attacked” Uniswap by airdropping a massive allocation of its SUSHI token to all Uniswap users, along with additional airdrop incentives for those who used Sushi’s DEX. Sushiswap, however, was unable to hold its ground against Uniswap amid rising competition and internal issues. For context, Sushiswap’s 30-day volume is $2B, and its annualized revenue is $73M.
YFI (-4.3%) - Decentralized yield aggregator project, Yearn Finance, suffered an exploit on Sunday night. The attacker exploited its yETH product, allowing them to mint an unlimited number of yETH, which they then sold through the decentralized exchange Balancer. The attacker then laundered about 1,000 ETH through Tornado Cash, a mixing service that obfuscates token ownership. The incident is isolated to just the yETH product and did not impact any of Yearn’s other product lines. Unfortunately, the exploit has resulted in a loss of about $9M, of which $2.4M has already been recovered through other avenues. The team has yet to provide a full post-mortem or recovery plan for users.
PENGU (+4%) - Yesterday, Pudgy Penguins, one of the most well-known NFT collection IPs, announced a partnership with the NHL. As part of the partnership, there will be giveaways and Pengu meetings with NHL fans, along with other “activations” that are designed to bring the Pudgy Penguins brand in front of the NHL fanbase. NHL joins a number of other partnerships that Pudgy Penguins has announced, including NASCAR, Walmart, Lufthansa, Barnes & Noble, and Target.
ETH (+4.1%) - This morning, Layer-1 protocol Ethereum performed its Fusaka hard fork upgrade. As Ethereum is a highly decentralized project, development and technical upgrades require much greater coordination and agreement among parties than in other protocols; therefore, its upgrades usually take much longer to implement. The changes in Fusaka focus on scaling Layer-2 protocols and on providing mechanisms to improve the overall user experience. The main feature, called PeerDAS, will increase transaction throughput on Layer-2s by about 8x, which should translate into lower data storage costs for L2s and savings for users. Other features in the upgrade include increasing the gas limit, aligning Ethereum’s cryptography with existing standards for enterprise integrations, and lower-latency transactions for users.

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