Recap: Kitchen AMA #4 on Twitter Space (July)
Dear CAKE holders!
For those who didn’t participate in the Kitchen AMA # 4 that was live on July 20 on Twitter Space, or for those who want to relive it, here is the recap!
Kitchen AMA… on Twitter Space!
As our last AMA was on Twitter spaces and our community loved it, we opted to continue hosting AMAs on Twitter — if you have any suggestions for alternative AMA platforms, please let us know!
AMA information
As usual, our lovely community admin, CakeMage, helped us moderating the AMA. Thank you CakeMage!
Moderator: CakeMage🧙
Speakers: Chef Snowball (Head Chef), Chef Icy 💎 (Business Development Manager), Chef Cadbury (Project Manager), Chef Bun (Product Manager), Chef Mochi 🍻 (Product Team) , Chef Fran(Community Manager)
Roadmap Q3 is released!
If you haven’t checked our Q3 Roadmap, check it out now!
👉https://docs.pancakeswap.finance/roadmap
TL;DR
- Multichain PancakeSwap is real, and we are going to do it in a way that doesn’t affect the CAKE emission too much while bringing more revenue and CAKE burn.
- Better stablecoin swap experience to capture the market opportunities and generate more buyback and CAKE burn.
- We do NOT want to compromise the quality of any product. While NFT will still be an important part of PancakeSwap, for now, we are prioritizing the products that underpin our platform and tokenomics
- Big shoutout to our NFT community! We will continue to explore the possibilities of bringing more utilities to our NFTs, and also improve on communicating with the NFT community. For now, Chef Fran (https://twitter.com/ChefFranPS) will be our main Point-of-Contact for PancakeSquad enquiries.
- We plan to expand our team to 30 Chefs, and will continue our commitment of hiring the best talent. Many (if not most) of our Chefs were users prior to joining the Kitchen — so don’t be shy, and please apply, or check out our opening positions.
🧙Q. What happened to Gamification? Is the gamification still in the backlog?
A. 🐇(Chef Cadbury): In Q1, we did try to work with a partner to develop a mini-game, 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, hence the running rabbit GIF. Upon testing it and rethinking the direction of gamification, we believe that we need much more research and development to make this content meaningful in terms of rewards, user experience and also the entertainment value. We’ve seen a lot of projects on the market that have a sub-par game just to be in the GameFi market, and it’s not sustainable. We did not want just to launch anything with sub-par quality to just fulfill the roadmap, especially if it cannot be meaningfully fun to play, or has a significant help to our CAKE tokenomics or user acquisition. So at the end we shelved it. After that, we also identified that we may not be in the best position to actually develop a fun-playing game as our team has been focused on DeFi in the past, so we looked into communicating with partners within BSC to work together but the integrating and collaboration progress is generally slower with a lot of details like dev quality, revenue-sharing arrangement to be settled. And eventually, also what we’ve learned is that, without new internal resources that have experience working on games, we still have to be reliant on either outside development partners or game project partners. Hence, before we could identify a concrete, trusted collaboration opportunity that we’re confident will provide a high-quality product to our users, we’re hesitant to guarantee a timeline at this moment.
A. 🐰(Chef Snowball): We cannot compromise the quality of the product — if it’s buggy we would not release it. In Q1 we explored Gamefi but we did underestimate the effort and time needed. We are talking to some external partners but we’re not releasing a gamefi product in Q3.
🧙Q. When will Pancakesquad NFTs get more utilities?
A. 🐰(Chef Snowball): Many raised questions about why NFT utilities were not on the roadmap. We probably should have communicated it more proactively (something we should improve in the future). We planned to add additional NFT utilities in Q3 but it’s not on the roadmap as NFT is not a very high priority item in the kitchen given it’s not our core business. But we know we have a very passionate NFT Community supporting us and we are very grateful. We also understand the NFT Market is huge, something we wanted to do more in the future when we have more bandwidth.
However, I also wanted to emphasize again that our top priority is to build products around CAKE, especially products that can bring more revenue leading to more buyback and burn. Our team is very clean with only 20 people, much smaller than other major DEXes. Therefore, although we plan to do plenty of new products and features, we have to plan very carefully and discuss what is feasible based on our team size. We are here for the long term and will keep building but, in the meantime, we hope our community members can be patient with us too.
Q.🧙Why are some of the milestones of the Squad community not supported with tweets on the official Twitter account? Is there any specific person we can address?
A. 🐰(Chef Snowball): There was a period of time that we were very short-handed on the community management and social media team. Therefore, there was probably some great news we should have tweeted about missed. Going forward, Fran for now can be the point of contact for taking care of asks from our community.
🧉(Chef Fran) : Hi there! For the ones who don’t know me, I’m Fran, PancakeSwap’s community manager. I’ve been behind the scenes since the beginning of 2021, but then I was very related to the Spanish community specifically. I don’t want to extend myself too far, just to tell you I’m here to hear you. Feel free to talk to me, I’m always around. So thank you guys!
Q.🧙 Would it be possible for PCS to clarify the art licenses of Pancakesquads and how the arts can be used by others to create content?
A. 💎(Chef Icy): I personally love all the stuff that the community has been doing, in regards to PancakeSwap art in general. Just to ground this question, I’m sure we are all aware that visual and artistic icons have been appropriated in different ways, throughout both modern and ancient history, for reasons that we may or may not support.
With this principle of neutrality in mind, we cannot officially support any community-created PancakeSquad creations. As Snowball & Fran mentioned we’re happy to retweet some important milestones. I personally feel that anyone in our community should feel free to utilize their PancakeSquad however they wish!
Q.🧙Will there be upgrades to the nft marketplace in the future?
A. 🐰(Chef Snowball): Probably not in the next quarter. Our NFT Marketplace was initially built as an MVP. So the underlying architecture was structured in a way that it was not super flexible. It takes a lot of effort to add new features or change anything.
Some community members suggest that we should consider working with the Community together to build the NFT Marketplace instead of doing everything in-house. But there are pros and cons with this approach. One of the options can be considered is to work with some other existing NFT Marketplaces to make ours more active.
Q.🧙Why does Pancakeswap not hire a dedicated team for the squad nft collection? Many people do not understand why there can’t be a distinct team for each section of your development.
A. 🐰(Chef Snowball): Our team is not structured in a way that a few people are dedicated to a very specific feature and a few others work on something else. For most of our products and features it is a joint effort across different functions. Taking PancakeSquad for example, our designer Cecy designed the collection and then other Chefs like Bun and Icy worked respectively on the technical aspect, including the IFO Private Sale, etc. We think that’s a much more efficient way to structure our team.
By the way, we do plan to expand our team aggressively, even though right now the market condition is weak and many other projects are actually doing layoffs. When we have more capacity we may allocate more resources to NFT.
Q.🧙Just about the expansion of the team in mind, is there a target to reach?
A. 🐰(Chef Snowball) Our target is 30. When we get to 30 we will assess the workload again and see if we need to expand further.
Q.🧙Can we look forward to joint IFO’s with binance? Or could this be an option for you to explore in the future?
A. 💎(Chef Icy): We have previously done IFOs with Binance Fan Tokens, and are constantly on the lookout for quality products and co-launches to introduce to our awesome community. So yeah, this is something that we are actively working on.
Q.🧙Next is one a good one, regarding multichain. What chains are you guys considering to add to PancakeSwap?
A. 🍻(Chef Mochi): We recently began looking at strategies to go Multichain.As a priority, we’re looking at Ethereum. It’s a key focus of ours to make sure that we improve our protocol’s revenue. We are thinking of strategizing how to deploy in stages to ensure that we do not affect the emissions of CAKE too much and to figure out which projects we would like to work with to bring onto the other chains. Then there’s also the consideration that if you’re going to, for example, Ethereum, where PancakeSwap is not a native DEX, we should ensure the way that the way we move across leads to us being competitive with other DEXes.We also want to bring additional users from other chains back to Pancakeswap on the BNB Chain.
Q.🧙 I think Mochi said something about potentially working with other projects as part of that expansion.
A. 🍻Mochi: We are very cognizant of the fact that we are the dominant Dex on BSC. But of course on Ethereum there are other competitors, like UniSwap, etc . And we don’t want to blindly go into other chains without assembling the best kind of position. And so one of the things that’s just under consideration for now is speaking to projects that we think would help the performance of our DEX on other chains. This is something that’s still under consideration.
Q.🧙 About Cake Burning: What are the strategies in the bear market?
🐰: The overall swap trading volume is decreasing given the weak market condition wo we wanted to deliver some new features that can potentially bring more revenue to PancakeSwap. That’s why we have multichain and stableswap, etc on our roadmap. It’s unlikely that every single item on the roadmap will just work out as we expected but, if one new product turns out to be very successful, it will help our burning in a significant way.
Q.🧙 Considering the impact of the Binance miniapp, are you cooking up new strategies to continue attracting new users?
A.🐇(Chef Cadbury): The mini-program has been quite helpful for attracting some new users from Binance, but certainly there is room to improve and promote our product and the concept of DeFi to the wider Binance user base. Currently, we’re working closely with the Binance team to further enhance the performance of the mini-program — for example, many have noticed that the loading speed when you open up the farms or pool page for the first time is slightly slower, like that we’ve been testing other methods like a webview to make sure the user experience is good. As the first large-scale mini-program there, the Binance team is also discovering these issues and innovating their mini-program architecture with us. Secondly, another strategy is to integrate in the Binance app further to increase the exposure. That means we’re trying to get more entrances to the mini-program where normal Binance users would frequently check. For instance, while Binance is promoting its DeFi Wallet within the account wallet overview, PancakeSwap is on the landing page of the wallet. Also, if Binance users search for a token that is not listed on Binance at the main search bar on the first page, like $LOOKS of Looksrare, they will be directed to our mini-program. So integrations like these are happening gradually, but first thing first is to make sure the product and user experience is good enough.
Q.🧙 : About Stableswap which appeared on the updated roadmap, what will be different from other Dexes?
A.🐇: While the product is still in the early development stage, a lot of details are still being decided. Ultimately it’s more about capturing the market opportunity of stablecoins trading on BNB Smart Chain.
Q.🧙 : Awesome, thanks! Next question, again about Multichain. Exploring other networks involves moving/splitting protocol capital. Will these funds come from the treasure trove of PCs? Would we be talking about the same CAKE token on different networks?
A. 🍻(Chef Mochi): Yes, there will be some level of protocol capital splitting since it’s inevitable, but main focus is still on BNB Chain. We’re looking at bringing users back to BNB Chain so there shouldn’t be new CAKE on other chains. We want to ensure that TVL stays strong in BNB Chain while being competitive with DEXs on other chains
Q.🧙There was a recent proposal to adjust the farm rewards but got rejected. Can you share the future strategy of farm rewards management so that the community has a clear picture?
A. 💎: So the future strategy of farm rewards management has been consistent — it is the same as the one we have now:re-allocate emissions from under-performing farms (low volume, low user metrics) to high-performing farms.
So why do we do this? In terms of the big picture, when we re-allocate emissions from under-performing farms (which we incentivise with our own CAKE), we are able to boost APRs on higher-performing farms, attracting more trading volume and liquidity, leading to higher CAKE burn from trading fee revenue. So this current and future strategy of farms rewards management allows us to accrue maximum value to both CAKE and the PancakeSwap platform.
Q.🧙Do you feel the risks of non kyc relationships, where it may be harder to track a bad actor?
A. 🐰: Regarding the non KYC on DEXes, it is considered as one of the advantages compared to CEXes. But everything comes with pros and cons. Apparently, bad actors are much harder to be tracked and identified. It won’t be surprising to see potential regulatory scrutiny on non-custodial wallets and DEXes,etc. Certain exchanges have already started to talk about the travel rule implementation.
Q.🧙Huge portion of Volume is coming from:BNB/USDT/BUSD pairs. Why not offer to lend/borrow for these pairs?
A. 🍻 : There are two points here. The first is that I’m sure most of you know about Venus. Venus is a very significant and large lending/borrowing market already and competing with them is not a very efficient use of our time. Actually the borrowing rates on the Stables that were mentioned, for example USDT, are only around 2%. So then this is not a very lucrative market to currently be in. It’s not a strong focus for us to replicate an entire lending & borrowing market that doesn’t have any competitive advantage. The second point is we actually looked into some more innovative borrowing and lending structures around stablecoins, which are less well-known on the market. As an established protocol like PancakeSwap, we don’t put user funds at risk. And some of the more interesting borrowing/lending structures that we’ve seen involve a kind of small risk of loss. We don’t really want to expose our users to that sort of risk. So I think in the short term, this is not a priority for us to create a lending and borrowing market.
Q.🧙: Thanks, Mochi. I think the community would appreciate the honesty of myself and I’m not a big fan of the lending & borrowing feature, I think it opens up the project to different risks. That was it in terms of questions for today, I guess we’re at the point of the AMA where typically something is kind of shared or leaked, right?
A.🐰: We’ll have another separate AMA soon to explain vCAKE (weighted voting power for fixed-term staking) as it is close to finishing!
🧙: Awesome!
Closing Words
🐰: I want to say that we are very grateful for having our community members here supporting us. And especially recently, I talked to a few folks in the NFT community and we discussed the NFT utility. I wanted to give a shout out to some large NFT holders like Kuxxed, NicoCrypt, Metatron and TigerHawk, etc. It’s our honor to have them giving so much love to our NFT collections, especially the Squad.
We will continue working hard and we are here for the long term, for everyone in our community. We would highly appreciate it if you can continue to support us and stay strong with us, especially during this bear market. Thanks for attending the AMA again and talk to you guys very soon.
Thanks for reading!! Lastly, don’t forget to follow our Twitter account and join our discord server to catch up on the latest news!
Chef Fran🧉
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