PancakeSwap Review – Is This AMM Worth Using?

About PancakeSwap

PancakeSwap is an open-source automated market maker (AMM) built on the Binance Smart Chain (BSM). In addition to a crypto exchange, PancakeSwap supports lending, yield farming, and NFTs. Because it is built on the BSM, users will need to connect a web-supported crypto wallet and use BNB (Binance coin) to facilitate transactions. There is also no KYC or AML verification required—once your wallet is connected, you may use their services.

PancakeSwap Exchange

The PancakeSwap exchange is very easy to use and looks like many other blockchain-built exchanges such as 1inch or Uniswap. Their exchange interface is actually somewhere in the middle of the two as they have charts like 1inch, though they are only line charts and don’t go down to lower timeframes, and they have a similar order panel design to Uniswap’s. Within that order panel, you can choose various settings such as slippage and transaction speed and, like most decentralized exchanges, PancakeSwap has virtually every crypto asset you would want to trade.

Liquidity

In addition to exchanging assets, you can also provide liquidity for whatever pair of assets you choose to earn LP tokens. By providing liquidity, you will receive a portion of all trading fees for that trading pair proportionate to the amount of liquidity you are providing. 0.17% of trading fees will go directly to liquidity providers, which is not quite on par with Uniswap or SushiSwap who give 0.3% and 0.25% to liquidity providers, respectively, but still better than nothing. Nevertheless, the pooling process is simple and remains a good opportunity to earn yield. 

PancakeSwap Farming

Another way to earn yield on PancakeSwap is through yield farming. They have over 90 farming pairs to choose from, most of which are paired with BNB, and they all pay earners in CAKE, the platform’s native token, in addition to fees accumulated. The APRs vary from pair to pair, but they can range anywhere from a few percent to over 500 percent. Compared to other yield farming platforms such as Uniswap, Aave, and Yearn finance, the PancakeSwap APYs are by far the most appealing. Even Sushiswap, which would likely be one of its closest rivals in this area, only goes as high as 90%.

Lending Pools

The final way to earn yield on PancakeSwap is through one of their 17 lending pools, or “Syrup Pools,” as they call them. The Syrup Pools allow you to stake CAKE to earn any one of the 17 supported assets. APYs for these various stake-and-earn pools will range anywhere from 40-60%. You can only stake CAKE, which could be frustrating to some, but the rewards are still very attractive.

PancakeSwap NFTs

PancakeSwap has an incredibly robust NFT market where users can buy and sell hundreds of NFTs from dozens of collections. The interface is set up quite nicely and makes scrolling through all the collections and newest arrivals both simple and enjoyable. You can also head to the activity section to apply filters and more easily sift through collections and listing and modification statuses. They even have a traits section to see how many NFTs they have with a certain specific trait and how rare that trait is. You can’t click any of the traits to be redirected to a list of the relevant NFTs, but it’s still a cool feature. All in all, their NFT market is a must-visit for any NFT enthusiast and, as far as exchanges go, there isn’t too much competition outside of FTX or Crypto.com, so it’s certainly worth checking out.

PancakeSwap Fees

Whenever someone trades on PancakeSwap, the trader pays a 0.25% fee, of which 0.17% is added to the Liquidity Pool of the swap pair they traded. While not a significant difference, this is notably cheaper than other decentralized exchanges like SushiSwap and Uniswap, whose fees are 0.3%. It doesn’t quite compare to the fee leaders for centralized exchanges such as Binance (0.1%), but it is still competitive among all exchanges, centralized or otherwise, especially with many exchanges such as Coinbase charging as much as 0.5%.

Trading Competitions/Lottery

A popular trend on crypto platforms these days is to include various trading competitions, and PancakeSwap is no exception. In their trading competitions, teams compete for the highest trading volume to win crypto prizes. Everyone who signs up for a battle will win a prize, but the higher your team ranks, the better the prizes will be. Teams are huge and easy to join, so you don’t have to assemble your own or trade millions in volume to be on a winning team. Note, however, there are only certain eligible trading pairs for the competitions: SANTOS/BNB, PORTO/BNB, LAZIO/BNB, SANTOS/BUSD, PORTO/BUSD, LAZIO/BUSD, CAKE/BNB, and CAKE/BUSD.

Blog

PancakeSwap has a pretty decent blog if you want to stay up-to-date on everything new and exciting about the platform. They have many different languages to choose from on the homepage of the blog, and once you click on your language, you’ll be taken to a feed where you can scroll through all the articles. The articles are beautifully organized and pretty sizable, so it’s genuinely a good resource for learning.

PancakeSwap Customer Support

If you need help using PancakeSwap or their services, you can go to their Customer Support page accessible at the bottom of their homepage. At the top of the support page, you’ll find basics related to getting started or common troubleshooting errors. Toward the bottom of the support page, you’ll find a list of products to get specific information on the exchange, farming, Syrup Pools, NFTs, and everything else. All the walkthroughs are organized and include extremely helpful step-by-step pictures.

Conclusion: PancakeSwap Review 

Compared to both decentralized and centralized exchanges, PancakeSwap is a very good option. While the fees paid out to liquidity providers are less than those of its main competitors, the trading fees are also less, so it really depends where your focus lies.

PancakeSwap also has some of the best yield farming, excellent staking rewards for CAKE, a helpful support center, and an amazing NFT market, so there are a lot of reasons to keep it in mind when searching for a go-to crypto platform. And unlike exchanges built on Ethereum, PancakeSwap has very low gas fees, so the luxuries of a permissionless exchange, in this case, don’t come with the exorbitant costs.

For anyone interested in yield chasing or NFTs, it’s hard not to have PancakeSwap in your top contenders, but it may not be the most ideal if you are focused more on trading, as their charting and order types are quite underdeveloped. That said, it has to be at least in your top three for decentralized exchanges and probably a strong consideration among all exchanges if your focus isn’t day trading. The NFT market alone could be more than enough reason to check it out, but there are plenty more reasons, so I would highly recommend giving it a shot.