What is Pancake Swap? DeFi enhanced
Alex Hernandez
Posted on March 18, 2022
Ever heard of PancakeSwap?
It's the hottest DEX on Binance, and it has more features than your usual exchange.
What is PancakeSwap?
PancakeSwap is a Binance Smart Chain-based DEX whose creators are anonymous.
It shares a few features with SushiSwap on Ethereum
- Community governance
- Farm liquidity provider (LP) tokens
However, it also has other rewarding features:
- Lottery
- Prediction Market
Swap tokens with a DEX
PancakeSwap at its core is a DEX for swapping BEP-20 tokens (think ERC20 on Ethereum)
It uses an 'Automated Maker Model' (AMM).
Instead of trading with someone else through an order book, you trade against a 'liquidity pool', which is a pool of funds.
Liquidity Pool Tokens
The 'liquidity pools' (LP) are filled with funds from other users. In exchange for storing funds in the pool, they receive LP tokens.
You can use LP tokens to:
- Reclaim your share of funds from the pool
- Get a % of trading fees as a reward
LP Tokens come in different varieties depending on the pool you add liquidity to.
Liquidity is added in pairs, so
- adding BUSD + BNB to the pool => BUSD-BNB LP Tokens in return
- BETH + ETH to pool => BETH-ETH LP Tokens
Farming and Staking
Now to move on to a fun feature of PancakeSwap, Farming and Staking.
You can deposit your LP tokens onto the farm to lock them up and get CAKE tokens in return.
You can now stake your CAKE into different 'SYRUP' pools and earn a variety of tokens
Lottery
PancakeSwap also has a lottery run every day.
First, you have to buy a ticket for 5 USD in CAKE tokens.
The ticket will contain 6 digits that have to match the winning numbers in the same order.
Rewards are distributed among 6 different prize pools.
Prediction Market
The last feature I'll cover is PancakeSwaps simple Prediction Market.
Here, you can place bets on the price of BNB.
Rounds are every 5 minutes. BNB's price is recorded at the start and you bet whether it will go up or down by the end of the round.
Conclusion
And that covers most of the activities you can do on PancakeSwap!
If you have some ETH, why not start with swapping it for some BNB so you can start using the rest of the platform!
This post is my personal notes summarising this article: https://academy.binance.com/en/articles/a-guide-to-pancakeswa
Posted on March 18, 2022
Join Our Newsletter. No Spam, Only the good stuff.
Sign up to receive the latest update from our blog.