PancakeSwap April Recap

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PancakeSwap

12 min readMay 25, 2022

MasterChef v2 and CAKE Syrup Pool Migration, Fixed-Term Staking, Q2 Roadmap, MOBOX Trading Competition, Binance NFT Listing, Kitchen AMA#2, and More!

Data Recap

Overall

Total Volume: $14.2B
Average Daily Volume: $473M
Unique traders: 4M
Unique onsite users: 7M
4 CAKE staker reward pools (Syrup + Boost)

$CAKE

Total burned: 27M CAKE ($134M)
Bought back from the market to burn: $13M
Total CAKE Emission Rate: 14.25/block
Effective CAKE Emission Rate: ~11.04/block
# of holders: 1,201,528 (+3%)

🍽✅ Served Last Month

Kitchen AMA #2 on Discord

The Chefs joined the amazing PancakeSwap community in our Discord server for our Kitchen AMA #2 on 19 April. Read the full recap here. The Kitchen plans to continue to host community AMAs, don’t miss the next one!

Q2 Roadmap

The Chefs released the Kitchen’s Q2 Roadmap with a lot of exciting items on the board. Such as fixed-term staking benefits and prediction and lottery updates. Remember, there are potentially a lot more items, some are not included in the roadmap due to considerations of security and confidentiality.

MasterChef v2 Migration

We know you’ve all been waiting for it….the long-awaited MasterChef v2 migration was completed!!!!!! Despite losing a few years off their bunny lives from the stress, hats off to the Chefs for making the migration smooth and simple for users. We’d like to give a HUGE thank you to our incredible community Admins for not only offering support and answering questions from the community, but also for translating the migration steps to various languages to provide our diverse community with an easy migration.

So what even is the MasterChef contract?

The MasterChef contract controls the emissions and allocation of CAKE to different farms and the CAKE Syrup Pool. When staking LP tokens in a Farm or staking CAKE in the CAKE syrup pool, users essentially deposit their LP tokens or CAKE into the MasterChef contract.

Then what was the whole reason for migrating to a new MasterChef contract?

To put it simply, the original MasterChef contract was an MVP (minimum viable product) so that PancakeSwap could launch with the Chefs quickly getting their paws on the ground running. That meant they didn’t have enough time to make the contract exactly how they wanted and did not allow for any future upgrades to the contract.

The new MasterChef v2 contract allows better control, flexibility, and accuracy with the allocation and burning of CAKE. This will be extremely helpful in future emission reductions. The 10 CAKE per block allocated to the CAKE Syrup Pool was fixed but the MasterChef v2 allows us to fine-tune this number as needed.

On top of that, we are now able to offer fixed-term staking, can add any future products if they need CAKE incentives, and enable more advanced farming products such as farm boosts.

If you still haven’t migrated, check out our step-by-step guide here: https://docs.pancakeswap.finance/code/migration/migrate-your-stakings

MasterChef v2 contract: https://bscscan.com/address/0xa5f8C5Dbd5F286960b9d90548680aE5ebFf07652

Fixed-Term Staking

To offer Fixed-term staking, we launched a new CAKE Syrup Pool during the MasterChef v2 migration. The new CAKE Syrup Pool provides users with two CAKE staking options; Flexible staking and Fixed-term staking. Flexible staking offers the same benefits as the old Auto CAKE pool. Fixed-term staking allows users to maximise their yield and earn more CAKE by locking their staked CAKE for a period of time they choose.

For additional information and how-to guides, please visit our new CAKE Syrup Pool documents page.

The new CAKE Syrup Pool contract address: https://bscscan.com/address/0x45c54210128a065de780C4B0Df3d16664f7f859e

Perpetual Trading Updates

In March, the Chefs were happy to serve up perpetual trading in collaboration with ApolloX Finance. PancakeSwap and ApolloX sponsored the Perpetual Trading Lucky Draw event with 100,000 USDT in prizes to celebrate the launch! The event included four weekly draw periods, with the last weekly draw period concluding on 12 April 2022 at 23:59 UTC.

Additionally, ApolloX listed 28 new perpetual contracts in April! Since PancakeSwap’s perpetual trading feature uses ApolloX’s futures contracts and trading infrastructure, ApolloX is responsible for all perpetual contract listings as PancakeSwap.

Try it today at https://perp.pancakeswap.finance/en/futures/BTCUSDT, and don’t forget, depositing CAKE will give traders a 5% discount on trading fees!

Please refer to our documents for more information on perpetual trading (including a glossary of common terms), FAQs, and how-to guides.

PancakeSwap NFT Collections

Our Pancake Squad NFT collection reached two huge milestones, Pancake Squads eclipsed 100,000 BNB in total trading volume on our NFT Marketplace and reached the top 20 in 24-hour volume on DappRadar!

Both Pancake Squad and Pancake Bunnies NFT collections have been whitelisted by Binance NFTs as well!

PancakeSwap Mini Program Updates

The Chefs added liquidity features to the PancakeSwap Mini-Program! Users can now add liquidity and create liquidity pool (LP) tokens through our Mini-Program using the Binance mobile application. See our docs pages to learn more about what it means to add liquidity and how to do it.

To celebrate the launch of our PancakeSwap Mini-Program, we announced a promotional event for new users who created a new address through the Binance DeFi wallet and traded in the PancakeSwap Mini-Program! Similar to the Perpetuals Trading Lucky Draw event, winners receive a share of 100,000 USDT in prizes, including four weekly draw periods. The event concluded on 01 May 2022 at 23:59 UTC.

As the Chefs have previously mentioned, we will continue to work to add more and more features to the Mini Program!

Instagram

We happily resumed our Instagram account! Follow us at https://www.instagram.com/pancakeswap_official/ for more Pancake flippin’ fun! If you’d like your amazing PancakeSwap related photo posted on our Instagram account, tweet the photo and tag @_ninahaus_EN in your tweet.

Be aware of copycats on Instagram! All other accounts are fake.

Mobox Trading Competition

Together with Mobox, the PancakeSwap Kitchen hosted the third trading competition with prizes worth up to $80,000 in tokens and NFTs. We changed the prize distributions, allowing users to fight for their team and fight for themselves to earn more prizes!

The top 100 players on each team walked away from the battle with a MOMO Avatar NFT and a LIMITED EDITION PancakeSwap NFT. Also, the top 500 players ranked by $MBOX trading volume won a Mobox Mystery Box.

During the trading competition, members from each team traded eligible pairs to gain points for their team and themselves. Fearsome Flippers took the lead right away and never looked back, finishing with $65.4M in trading volume. It was a close battle for second place as Syrup Storm finished with $1.36M more in trading volume than Chaotic Cakers.

Due to some delay in statistics, the tallying for the trading competition took a bit longer than anticipated. The Chefs apologise again for any inconvenience that this may have caused.

Farm Auctions

6 different projects joined Farm Auctions to bid for a coveted PancakeSwap farm. We launched #19 and #20 auctions, with 6 winning farms in total in April, burning a total of 78,140 CAKE.

We’ve burned a total of 602,780 CAKE so far since the first auction launched in August.

Farm Auctions enable projects to incentivise liquidity provision for their token and provide a way for the PancakeSwap community to be introduced to exciting, new projects!

If you’re a project looking to run a Farm, apply via the PancakeSwap Farm application form.

Revelation Hackathon

PancakeSwap has two bounties for the BNB Chain Revelation Hackathon:

$12,500 for Community IFO Auction — Develop a system similar to PancakeSwap’s Farm Auction where users and project owners can propose fresh new tokens to be launched on PancakeSwap’s IFO platform.
$20,000 for NFT Marketplace Improvements — Improve PancakeSwap’s existing NFT Marketplace with some of the following features.

For more information on the specific requirements, how to participate, and submittal information, check out our announcement here.

Additional Items

$CAKE is now available on Binance Pay!
Binance Bridge 2.0 was announced supporting nine tokens initially, all nine can be traded on PancakeSwap.
Binance Launchpool announced Project Galaxy (GAL) allowing users to farm GAL by staking BNB, BUSD, and CAKE!
QiDao launched on BNB Chain with 0% interest stablecoin loans and added $CAKE as collateral for $MAI!
To celebrate the Easter holiday, BNB Chain and PancakeSwap launched an Easter campaign with $15,000 shared among both communities. The events can be found in our Twitter moment https://twitter.com/i/events/1516889604804153344?s=20.
Check out our new Telegram sticker pack! https://twitter.com/PancakeSwap/status/1514334455778856962?s=20&t=sBoxZ9A3vvR3crtH8wyBDw

Proposals

CAKE gives a voice to the PancakeSwap community, letting the community vote on various proposals that relate to the platform. CAKE holders voted on six core proposals in April.

Voting on a proposal for a new Syrup Pool and Farm is essential.

A new farm incentivises liquidity providers and offers a new opportunity for users to earn CAKE. A new farm will slightly dilute the CAKE rewarded to existing farms.
A new Syrup Pool allows CAKE holders to stake their CAKE for a new token.

All proposals for boosting or adding a new farm and Syrup Pool passed this month.

Proposals for adjusting farm rewards are critical. The purpose is to redirect CAKE rewards given to underperforming farms and provide them to farms that offer the most value. Redirecting CAKE to other farms allows PancakeSwap to incentivise farmers to provide more liquidity to pairs with higher daily volume, new projects, or unique tokens on BSC. This can attract new users and help increase trading volume enabling PancakeSwap to be a one-stop-shop for DeFi, sharing PancakeSwap with more users and adding more CAKE lovers!

When reviewing these proposals, one thing that is always unclear to people is that we aren’t “removing” rewards from the farm itself. We simply redistribute the CAKE rewards from underperforming farms to the farms that provide the most value.

Meet Our New Chefs

Chef Tooty — Full Stack Engineer
Chef Xander — Social Media Manager

For those of you on our Discord, you might be familiar with “Tooty’s Bot”. The bunny behind the bot, Chef Tooty, has joined the kitchen as a Full Stack Engineer. Chef Tooty is a pirate hat-wearing squad bunny with a passion for crypto, programming and disc golf!

For unknown reasons, Chef Xander volunteered to be a community admin the week after PancakeSwap launched. It must have been the stickers….or being asked by a Chef if the bunnies were too childish. Either way, Chef Xander made the hop from community admin to Chef joining the Kitchen as a Social Media Manager.

Become a Chef

We’re still hiring for positions in the kitchen! Think you’ve got what it takes to become a Chef?

You can now find our technical job postings on https://angel.co/pancakeswap! Keep checking as we will be adding more technical and non-technical job postings!

We still have plenty of roles open, including the recently added Business Development Manager and Communications/Public Relations Manager roles. Check them out on our hiring page!

👩‍🍳🕔 Still Cooking (Coming Soon)

Prediction Upgrades

As we mentioned in the Q2 roadmap. We are now working with Chainlink to bring something new to our beloved PancakeSwap predictions. You might already guess what it is. But wait, there is more! Chef Cheems actually leaked it during the Kitchen AMA #2, did you catch the leak?

Fixed-Term Staking Benefits — IFO

With the launch of the fixed-term staking CAKE syrup pool. We are now working on other great incentives and benefits for our fixed-term staking holders. According to our plan stated in the launch of the new fixed-term staking pool. CAKE will always be the center of PancakeSwap and the center of CAKE will be the fixed-term staking pool. Therefore all the future benefits and new good stuff are coming to long-term holders first.

Stay tuned for more updates about upcoming IFOs and how to participate by fixed-term staking.

Lottery Upgrades

As mentioned in the April AMA, the lottery is one of our most popular subsidiary products and the Kitchen is cooking up something tasty for all the lottery degens out there (looking at you CakeMage). Users will be able to stake CAKE in this new lottery game, and part of the staking rewards will be used to participate in each lottery round. Auto-participation is something that many users have been asking us to add. We think that participation by staking will be an elegant solution on all technical sides, user experience and Tokenomics. It will also help us to increase CAKE revenue and burn.

Zap

Zap is the function to make adding liquidity/removing liquidity much easier.

You have to go through a relatively complicated process if you want to add liquidity now. First, you have to swap, prepare two tokens 50:50, go to the liquidity page, and provide it. It is not a super complicated mess, but it’s challenging for DeFi beginners.

ZAP feature is very newbie-friendly, for anyone who got entered DeFi Space. We think right now it’s good timing to add this feature as we are getting more new users via the mini-program in the Binance app. Even if the users aren’t familiar with DeFi, they will be able to add liquidity with a single click.

NFT Based Gamification

First, in Q1, we actually did work on developing and creating our own mini-game to understand the community’s interests. As simple as it sounds, we developed this bunny racing game, — it’s just a game for users to bet on the Bunny that would run the fastest in each round. But upon testing it and rethinking the direction of gamification, we believe that we needed much more research and development to make this content meaningful in terms of rewards, user experience and entertainment value. We did not want just to launch anything with sub-par quality to fulfil the roadmap item. We will launch it when it’s to a point where we feel like it can provide real value, like entertainment value, or Tokenomics-wise, it can help with CAKE or user acquisition. So we did develop something and shelved it.

Secondly, we’ve also been rethinking the gamification direction. Different ideas are floating around. Do we want to launch completely unrelated mini-games? Or should we focus on gamification related to our core products like farms, pools, and IFO — more like task-based or achievement-based UI? Or should we further solidify our role as the platform within BSC to work with other game projects to bring game content and NFT utilities to our site while providing exposure and traffic value to them? These are the directions we’re thinking and headed. While we cannot disclose the names as nothing is set in stone yet, we have started some initial discussions with several biggest game projects on BSC.

As mentioned, we’re thinking in the whole Gamification direction. We want to be a platform for the BNB Chain ecosystem, so we are actually trying to bring another game project to our platform. We’re asking these games to accept our assets, NFTs. You know, some of our characters to be used in their games. It would be one of our NFT utilities. It’s still a concept, and we’re discussing it with the partners.

Hackathon

After the release of the new CAKE Syrup Pool and migration to MasterChef v2 is complete, we will be hosting our own hackathon!

In the meantime, check out our bounties for the Revelation Hackathon by BNB Chain!

Calling for more NFT Collections!

Are you the creator of a BSC NFT collection? Applications for listings are now OPEN!

We are currently only processing BEP-721 NFT collections already 100% minted on Binance Smart Chain. Your metadata and images must be stored on IPFS or a similar decentralised storage platform.

Apply to list your NFT collection at https://docs.pancakeswap.finance/contact-us/.

Still hungry?

🤔 Apart from all the new things mentioned above, is there anything else you’d like to see?

Please join us on Twitter, in our Telegram group, in our Discord server, or in our growing Reddit community!

Stack ‘em!

Chef Xander 🐰🥞