One morning, about a week after the kitchen opened, Maki rolled in and found the hat on its hook, the soup still simmering and the Chef nowhere to be seen.

There was a note. It said, roughly, sorry. Overnight, the Chef had taken the kitchen’s savings jar (the developer fund, a pile of SUSHI set aside to pay for building things) and swapped it all for ETH. Around 38,000 ETH of it.

The customers were furious. The price of SUSHI tumbled down the stairs. And the kitchen, which everybody had been told belonged to its customers, suddenly felt as if it belonged to whoever held the keys.

For a few days the keys were handed around like a hot potato. They went to a famous trader from a big exchange, who passed them on to a group of trusted community members.

That group made a new kind of lock: a multisig. Five cooks each got a key, and the chest would only open when at least three of them turned theirs together. No single cook, however tall the hat, could empty it alone.

Then, a few days later, something nobody expected happened. The Chef sent the ETH back, all of it, to the kitchen’s treasury, with another note. This one said, roughly, I’m sorry. It’s yours.

The kitchen wants to spend some of its treasury to pay the cooks. Here are five keyholders. Tap them to turn their keys. The chest opens only when enough of them agree.

Try opening it with just one key. Then try a sneaky one: what if somebody wants to empty the whole chest?

From that week on, the kitchen kept its keys on a ring. It was slower, and a bit more annoying, and much, much safer. Meanwhile, out in the fields, the harvest was waiting.