PancakeSwap helps you make the most out of your crypto by trading, earning, and winning. This PancakeSwap review is an up-to-date, detailed analysis of PancakeSwap exchange containing everything you need to get started with PancakeSwap and whether It’s the right exchange for you.
Let’s find out!
PancakeSwap review
PancakeSwap exchange is a leading decentralized exchange on the BNB Chain that was launched by anonymous developers in September 2020 with an apparent passion for pancakes.
On this DEX, you can swap BEP-20 tokens, stake CAKE in Syrup Pools, lend and provide liquidity on the automated market maker, participate in Initial Farm Offerings, engage in perpetual trading, and buy or sell NFTs via the NFT Marketplace.
PancakeSwap uses an automated market maker model where users trade against a liquidity pool. These pools are filled by users who deposit their funds into the pool and receive liquidity provider (LP) tokens in return.
These tokens can later be used to reclaim their share of the pool, as well as a portion of the trading fees. These LP tokens are known as FLIP. PancakeSwap also allows users to farm additional tokens such as CAKE and SYRUP. On the farm, users can deposit LP tokens and get rewarded with CAKE.
It also allows users to trade BEP20 tokens, provide liquidity to the exchange and earn fees, stake LP tokens to earn CAKE, stake CAKE to earn more CAKE, and stake CAKE to earn tokens of other projects.
PancakeSwap review: What is PancakeSwap exchange?
PancakeSwap is an automated market maker (AMM), a decentralized application that allows users to swap different tokens, providing liquidity via farming and earning fees in return. You can become a liquidity provider and receive LP tokens, which entitle users to a share of the exchange’s trading fees.
LP token holders can also engage in yield farming to earn PancakeSwap exchange utility tokens, (CAKE). The token can be staked in so-called ‘Syrup Pools’ with flexible or fixed-term staking. Flexible staking allows users to unstake at any time, while fixed-term staking maximizes yield and locks up tokens for up to 52 weeks.
PancakeSwap review: PancakeSwap Features
Swapping/Trading
PancakeSwap lets users trade permissionless without the need to go through a centralized exchange. Everything you do on PancakeSwap is routed directly through your own wallet. Thus, there’s no need to trust anyone else with your coins.
Liquidity Pools
You can only swap tokens on PancakeSwap if there is enough liquidity for those tokens. If nobody has added much liquidity for the token or tokens you want to swap, it will be difficult, expensive, or impossible to do so.
Providing liquidity will get you LP Tokens, which will earn you rewards in the form of trading fees for making sure there’s always liquidity for the exchange to use.
Yield Farming
Yield farming lets users that are providing liquidity earn CAKE rewards by locking their LP tokens into a smart contract. The incentive is to balance out the risk of impermanent loss that comes along with locking in your liquidity.
Initial Farm Offerings (IFOs)
An Initial Farm Offering is an event that lets users buy into a limited-time offer to purchase new tokens. The IFO price is usually very generous.
Staking
With PancakeSwap staking, traders can stake CAKE in PancakeSwap’s Syrup Pools, which offer both flexible and fixed staking options. They will need to connect a wallet to the pool via the Pools page.
How PancakeSwap Staking works?
Flexible staking allows users to un-stake CAKE tokens from a syrup pool at any time. However, there is a fee for un-staking within 72 hours. After 3 days, they will be able to unstake with no fee. The 3-day timer resets every time additional CAKE is added to the pool.
With Fixed-Term Staking users can stake CAKE or other BSC tokens and earn CAKE rewards. Once CAKE is locked in fixed-term staking, the user can add more CAKE to prolong the duration of the lock. 52 weeks is the longest amount of time that may be locked. Longer lock-up times result in larger yield rewards.
However, users will not be able to shorten the duration of the locking period. Moreover, they can’t change CAKE from fixed to flexible staking, get tokens out of the account, or harvest rewards until the fixed lock period is over.
PancakeSwap review: Why PancakeSwap?
PancakeSwap has an array of products and services integrated into its ecosystem to facilitate ease of use and improve the customer experience.
Exchange
PancakeSwap is an automated market maker (AMM), and the Exchange is at the heart of PancakeSwap. PancakeSwap is the leading AMM on the BNB Smart Chain, and, as statistics show, the most popular decentralized exchange (DEX) ever.
Syrup Pools to stake CAKE
You can stake CAKE in Syrup pools to earn free tokens. It’s really that easy.
Syrup pools are the simplest way to earn free tokens on PancakeSwap. Some special pools let you stake other tokens besides CAKE, too
Lottery V2 version
Playing the PancakeSwap Lottery gives you a chance to win huge CAKE prizes. It’s easy, and fair, and you can enter as often as you like as long as you have the CAKE to buy a ticket.
Predictions market
With PancakeSwap predictions, you can predict if the price of BNBUSD or CAKEBUSD will be higher or lower than it was when the “LIVE” phase started.
If you enter an “UP” position and the “Closed Price” is higher than the “Locked Price” at the end of the 5-minute LIVE phase, you WIN and if it’s lower, you lose.
If you enter a “DOWN” position, and the “Closed Price” is higher than the “Locked Price” at the end of the 5-minute LIVE phase, you LOSE, but if it’s lower, you win.
NFT Marketplace
NFT collection creators can earn creator royalties on trades on PancakeSwap as well as get visibility for their project on the most prominent NFT marketplace, BNB Smart Chain. You can also apply to list on PancakeSwap NFT Marketplace.
NFT Profile System
PancakeSwap supports personalized profiles for users. These profiles allow you to choose your own name, join a team, and choose from NFT profile images you’ve collected to use as your profile’s display picture.
Perpetual trading
The bunnies have rubbed their paws and worked very hard in conjunction with ApolloX to bring this new feature to PancakeSwap. Trade your favorite pairs in a decentralized way on the site! Without intermediaries, easy, fast, safe, and within reach of your legs, well, and hands.
PancakeSwap Pros and Cons
Pros
- Low fees: PancakeSwap runs on BNB Smart Chain, a blockchain with much lower transaction costs than Ethereum or Bitcoin. Trading fees are lower than other top decentralized exchanges too, so that’s a double win for you!
- Decentralized: Trade directly from your wallet app. Unlike centralized exchanges like Binance or Coinbase, PancakeSwap doesn’t hold your funds when you trade: you have 100% ownership of your own crypto.
- Ability to Earn: You can earn a great deal by staking on PancakeSwap. Stake CAKE and earn free tokens with super high-interest rates. There’s also PancakeSwap lottery, BNB price prediction, NFT Collectibles, and more!
- Educational resources: PancakeSwap has a hub of educational resources for users containing the latest news, partnerships, and also a wide array of products and services and how to Interact with them.
Cons
- Impermanent loss from liquidity pools: Impermanent loss is the difference between holding tokens in an automated market maker (AMM) and holding them in your wallet. Thus, providing liquidity is not without risk, as you may be exposed to impermanent loss. Check out this great article on impermanent loss in DeFi.
- Prediction and Lottery: This can result in losing funds quickly. Users should be well aware of the risks it poses and should be knowledgeable enough to carry out such activities so as not to end up gambling away their funds.
PancakeSwap review: How does PancakeSwap work?
PancakeSwap offers a variety of products such as exchange, yield farming, syrup pools to stake CAKE, lottery version 2, predictions market, NFT marketplace, NFT profile system, and others.
Unlike centralized exchanges (CEX), this decentralized exchange (DEX) doesn’t require signing up or carrying out know-your-customer (KYC) procedures.
PancakeSwap is a software, so PancakeSwap exchange app doesn’t exist, as the platform can be interacted with by visiting its website, Pancakeswap.finance, or using a decentralized application (DAPP) like Trust wallet, or Meta mask wallet, then you connect your wallet to the platform and begin to explore.
On the exchange, you can swap and trade BEP20 tokens. Furthermore, you can add your token to a liquidity pool to receive liquidity provider (LP) tokens. LP tokens provide you with a share of the trading fee, 0.17% on PancakeSwap. Although liquidity providers go through a rush if there is an impermanent loss.
Users need to remember to always research the tokens they are buying and selling. Since PancakeSwap is a DEX, anyone can list a token and provide liquidity for it. You can also trade perpetual or swap tokens at your desired price with a limit order.
PancakeSwap Exchange Coin (CAKE)
The PancakeSwap token CAKE is a BEP20 token that was originally launched on Binance Smart Chain. The main function of CAKE is to incentivize users that provide liquidity to the PancakeSwap platform.
Users can stake their CAKE tokens to earn rewards, which is done by depositing liquidity Provider tokens and locking them up. This is known as “farming” and is rewarded by the system with CAKE tokens. The tokens can be un-staked with zero holding time.
CAKE can be used to enter a lottery on PancakeSwap. Each lottery session takes 6 hours. A single ticket costs 10 CAKE and comes with a random combination of four numbers between 1 and 14.
To win the jackpot, which equals 50% of the entire lottery pool, the numbers in your ticket need to match all four of the numbers in the winning ticket. PancakeSwap CAKE has many applications in its ecosystem.
The live PancakeSwap price today, according to coinmarketcap, is $3.72 USD with a 24-hour trading volume of $29,285,721 USD. PancakeSwap is up 0.12% in the last 24 hours.
PancakeSwap exchange ranking according to coinmarketcap is number #67, with a live market cap of $541,686,185 USD. It has a circulating supply of 145,743,091 CAKE coins and a maximum supply of 750,000,000 CAKE coins.
PancakeSwap Coin List
PancakeSwap exchange has a long array of tokens. All BEP-20 tokens can be traded and swapped, such as:
- Wrapped BNB
- Bitcoin BEP2
- Safuu
- BinaryX
- TIME
- Square Token
- Binance USD
- Ethereum
- PancakeSwap
Also, you have access to several popular futures pairs, such as
- BTC/USDT
- ETH/USDT
- BNB/USDT
PancakeSwap exchange API
In terms of customization, user-interface simplicity of navigation, and design, the trading platforms utilized by various exchange platforms differ from one another. It is because multiple criteria are used by different exchange platforms use different criteria while building their exchange.
Regardless of the variations, a good decentralized exchange platform should be user-friendly, simple to interact with, and have essential tools incorporated into its API like liquidity pools, swapping, etc.
PancakeSwap Farms
Yield Farming in Farms is a great way to earn CAKE rewards on PancakeSwap.
Unlike Syrup pools, farms require you to stake two tokens to get LP tokens, which you then stake in the Farm to earn rewards. This lets you earn CAKE while still keeping a position in your other tokens.
How PancakeSwap Farms work?
To get started, you’re going to need some “LP Tokens” to enter a Farm with. Farms can only accept their own exact LP token; for example, the CAKE-BNB Farm will only accept CAKE-BNB LP tokens.
To get the exact LP token, you’ll need to provide liquidity for that trading pair. So to get CAKE-BNB LP Tokens, you’ll first have to provide liquidity for the CAKE-BNB pair. You can check out this great article about PancakeSwap farms.
PancakeSwap review: PancakeSwap Liquidity
When you add your token to a liquidity pool, you will receive liquidity provider (LP) tokens and share in the fees.
How PancakeSwap Liquidity works?
If you deposited CAKE and BNB into a liquidity pool, you’d receive CAKE-BNB LP tokens. The number of LP tokens you receive represents your portion of the CAKE-BNB Liquidity Pool. You can also redeem your funds at any time by removing your liquidity.
Providing liquidity gives you a reward in the form of trading fees when people use your liquidity pool. Whenever a user trades on PancakeSwap, the user pays a 0.25% fee, of which 0.17% is added to the liquidity pool of the swap pair they traded on.
To make being a liquidity provider even more worth your while, you can also put your LP tokens to work whipping up some fresh yield on the CAKE Farms, while still earning your 0.17% trading fee reward.
PancakeSwap exchange review
These PancakeSwap Reddit reviews include both positive and negative feedback from users who have interacted with PancakeSwap exchange. Below are some of the top PancakeSwap Reddit reviews from its users:
“I have tried many DeFi platforms, but for me, only PancakeSwap works really well.” The platform is easy to use, and I only need a single coin to get high returns without liquidity mining. Binance Chain is centralized but at least has low fees. PancakeSwap has by far the highest market capitalization, so the price should be relatively stable.”
“Pancakeswap is the only Dex I use currently. They are also, in my opinion, the most trustworthy. One of the few where the TVL is high and the native token actually holds its value and even gets more valuable.”
PancakeSwap review: PancakeSwap vs Uniswap
PancakeSwap and Uniswap are two of the most popular decentralized exchanges on their respective blockchains, i.e., Ethereum and Binance. They both enable users to seamlessly swap blockchain native assets against each other for low fees and minimal slippage.
PancakeSwap
Pancakeswap launched in September 2020 as a decentralized crypto exchange built on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). It allows users to swap BEP20 tokens.
The exchange is a fork of Uniswap, and it uses Automated Market Maker (AMM) to automate the process of exchanging cryptocurrencies, making it a trustless and permissionless platform.
As of September 2021, PancakeSwap claims to be the most popular decentralized platform, with over 2.8 million users and $9.9 billion in total value locked (TVL). The latest version is PancakeSwap V2, and there are 1,426 token pairs to trade on the DEX.
Uniswap
Uniswap launched in November 2018 as one of the first decentralized exchanges built on the Ethereum blockchain network. Since then, the protocol has undergone numerous upgrades.
Uniswap allows crypto traders to trade ETH and ERC-20 tokens from a variety of wallets, including Metamask, Coinbase Wallet, and Fortmatic.
As one of the first wildly successful DeFi protocols, most DEXs like SushiSwap and PancakeSwap have, in one way or another, copied features from Uniswap to run their own platforms.
As of September 2021, Uniswap had over $6.3 billion in TVL. The protocol boasts over 1.5 million all-time users and $386 billion in trade volume. The latest version of the protocol is Uniswap V3, which launched on the mainnet in May 2021. You can check out this great article about Uniswap review.
The below table shows a detailed comparison of PancakeSwap vs Uniswap.
| Comparison | Uniswap | Pancakeswap |
|---|---|---|
| Available Assets | ETH, Arbitrum, Optimism and Polygon | Supports Binance Smart Chain (BSC) cryptos |
| Fees | 0.3% Per Swap | 0.25% Per Swap |
| Security | As the largest DEX by volume and usage, Uniswap is the safest decentralized application you can use. | PancakeSwap is a fork of Uniswap (v2) so PancakeSwap is equally as safe and secure. |
| Website | uniswap.org | pancakeswap.finance |
PancakeSwap vs Uniswap Reddit
These reviews show which decentralized exchanges users have interacted with and hence think it’s best. Below are some of the top PancakeSwap vs Uniswap Reddit reviews from its users:
“Uniswap has expensive fees so I choose pancakeswap for now. If fees go down on uniswap, I may use both of them. All got to do with transaction fees.”
“Uni is preferred because it is on the ethereum blockchain, but this also means it is unusable to most people at this time due to fees, and likely will be for years to come. I’ll be glad to use UNI in the future, likely on Cardano, or Cosmos as an application specific chain, if the devs go that route.
PancakeSwap is on bsc, which is a less desirable network, but will probably turn out just fine in the long run. The low fees in bsc make it usable for everyone craving DeFi right now, and its ecosystem has exploded because of it.”
“I’ve thought about this as well.
Sure Cake does just as much volume as Uni. But Uni has the first mover advantage and is the “premium option”. The old time, big money crypto investors would barely accept Uni as a legitimate token, let alone Sushi, and then Pancake Swap is behind that.
To me it’s kind of like an Android vs. Iphone type question. Sure more people use Android, but the stock you want to buy is Apple. (the Android here is basically every other Dex that isn’t Uni).
I think Pancake has much better tokenomics than Uni (with the lottery and part of trading fees going to burn). Albeit I don’t really know much about Uni tokenomics, besides that they just airdrop it to Uni users and liquidity providers.”
PancakeSwap review: How to use PancakeSwap
To use PancakeSwap, you will first need to create a crypto wallet, then connect PancakeSwap to your cryptocurrency wallet.
Step 1
To connect a wallet, all you need to do is click on the “Connect” button, which will be located in the top right corner of the screen, after which a pop-up window should appear on your screen with a list of all of the supported wallets. You’ll be required to connect one of the crypto wallets to PancakeSwap.
Step 2
Then, if you want to transfer crypto from your wallet, all you have to do is go to the sidebar menu and click on “Trade,” followed by “Exchange.”
There, you can select the token that you want to swap, and the one you want to receive. All you have to do to complete the transaction is to confirm it in your wallet.
Step 3
To provide liquidity to a pool, click on “Trade” followed by “Liquidity,” then click on “Add Liquidity” in the pop-up window, after which you need to specify the pair of tokens that you want to deposit to provide liquidity.
You can click on “select a currency” to select a currency from the drop-down from which you’d like to swap to another currency.
After confirming the transaction, you will earn an LP token corresponding to the pair you initially provided.
Step 4
To farm, all you have to do is click on “Earn” followed by “Farms” and select a farm for your LP tokens, after which you can specify the amount to farm and confirm the operation.
Step 5
To stake PancakeSwap, you will first need CAKE tokens.
In order for you to start staking, you will need to click on “Earn,” followed by “Pools,” and select the pool you want.
Then, send CAKE tokens to that selected pool. This way, the profit you earn can be withdrawn through the “Harvest” option or reinvested through the “Compound” option.
PancakeSwap review: How to connect Trust wallet to PancakeSwap
Follow the steps below to connect Trust Wallet.
Step 1
Open Trust Wallet and tap the DApps button on the bottom of the screen.
Step 2
Scroll down to “Popular” and tap on “PancakeSwap”.
A new page will open with the PancakeSwap logo and some information. Tap the “Connect button.”
PancakeSwap will open up. If you see a Connect button in the top-right tap that and tap Trust Wallet from the list.
PancakeSwap review: PancakeSwap Fees
PancakeSwap has very reasonable fees for a decentralized exchange, with tokenomics in place that help the future value of CAKE. The fee’s structure is shown in the table below:
| PancakeSwap Fees | Charges |
|---|---|
| Trading fees | 0.25% |
| Returned to Liquidity Pools in the form of a fee reward for liquidity providers | 0.17% |
| Sent to the PancakeSwap Treasury | 0.03% |
| Sent towards CAKE buyback and burn | 0.05% |
Almost all the fees are returned to liquidity providers, while a small portion goes to the Treasury, and the remainder is used for the weekly buyback and burn of CAKE, which is meant to be a deflationary mechanism.
PancakeSwap Withdrawal fees
From our research and understanding, PancakeSwap does not charge any withdrawal fees other than the network fees. The network fees are fees paid to the miners of the relevant crypto/blockchain and not fees paid to the exchange itself. Network fees vary from day to day depending on the network pressure.
Generally speaking, only having to pay the network fees should be considered below the global industry average when it comes to fee levels for crypto withdrawals. The table below displays the following withdrawal fees for PancakeSwap CAKE tokens on different exchanges.
Is PancakeSwap legit?
PancakeSwap Exchange is open-source and has been audited by reputable security firms like Certik and Slowmist.
From our research, the platform is safe to use, as it has never been hacked. The only risks of using the PancakeSwap Exchange are temporary farm losses due to impermanent loss.
PancakeSwap review: Conclusion
According to this PancakeSwap review, PancakeSwap is a well-designed DEX that provides an array of features, products, and services with the ability to make money through tokens, farms, and pools. There’s a strong inflow of investment and a high outflow of returns.
It’s proven to be a safe and reliable exchange, audited by CertiK and Slowmist, enabling users to profit from the turbulent cryptocurrency market.
Although there’s no support system in place on its website, there is a pool of social media platforms where users can connect with the team behind the project and its community.
Apart from making good use of technology, platforms like PancakeSwap makes the crypto-experience fun and engaging for users. If not anything else, this definitely contributes towards strengthening adoptions.
[WPSM_AC id=1384]
