Decentralized Exchange On Binance Smart Chain Records Massive Volume Surge

PancakeSwap, a decentralized exchange running on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), is now the second-largest decentralized exchange on the network and the third-largest overall based on daily volumes.

PancakeSwap emerged during the September 2020 DeFi boom, but rather developing on Ethereum’s blockchain, the decentralized exchange chose the Binance Smart Chain and its BEP20 architecture. Featurewise, PancakeSwap does not differ from other decentralized exchanges like SushiSwap, as the exchange offers automated market making and yield farming. PancakeSwap refers to farming pools as kitchens. PancakeSwap also offers a native governance token, called CAKE.

The ongoing gas fees crisis on Ethereum’s blockchain is pushing yield farmers and DeFi users towards alternatives developed and operating on other blockchains. This is the primary reason for PancakeSwap’s explosion in volumes. The decentralized exchange surpassed Sushiswap and took the third spot in the overall volume ranking on CoinMarketCap.

Gas fees on Ethereum’s blockchain continue to surge, with an average cost for a transaction sitting around its highest ever level of $25. The price point renders smaller token swaps and yield pool switching totally unviable.

PancakeSwap started its volume surge on Monday, February 8, with the exchange recording 24-hour volumes of around $167 million. It reached an upwards of $745 million on 10th February, but it dropped to $523.56 million.

Source: Pancakeswap

24-hour volumes have surged 60 percent, making PancakeSwap bigger than SushiSwap, 1inch, and 0x Protocol, and second only to Uniswap in CoinGecko’s DEX ranking list. WBNB/BUSD is the most-traded market pair and accounts for around $195 million, or close to 25% of the total trading volume.

In just a week PancakeSwap’s user base grew over 36% to 58,400 active wallets making the DEX the most used DeFi product on the Binance Smart Chain.

Furthermore, Binance CEO Chanpeng Zhao showed his support for the decentralized exchange on Twitter, adding that BSC outperformed Ethereum when looking at the daily transactions charts.

“Today is an important day. BSC flipped Ethereum on daily transactions. This validates the logic that low fees attract more users & projects,“ Zhao noted.    

Meanwhile, the price per PancakeSwap’s governance token – CAKE, exploded over 200% on a weekly basis. On February 8, the average price per CAKE token hovered around $3,12 before skyrocketing to an all-time high of $8.16. However, CAKE’s price took a steep correction, which made the governance token trade at $6.38 as of press time. Nevertheless, CAKE still sits 173.8% higher than before the massive volumes surge.