PancakeSwap

PancakeSwap is a set of smart contracts and a web app for swapping tokens against liquidity pools, without an account or a deposit. Its own docs group the product into three parts: trade (swaps, cross-chain swaps and perpetuals), earn (liquidity pools, farms and staking pools) and win (a lottery and a price prediction game).

The project went live on BNB Chain, then called Binance Smart Chain, in September 2020; its core contract repositories were created on GitHub that month. It has since spread to ten more networks, but DefiLlama still puts about 97% of its liquidity on BNB Chain as of October 2026.

The team is pseudonymous. The docs list about 40 contributors by kitchen-themed names, led by a "Head Chef" called Chef Kids, with roles from product and operations to smart-contract development, QA and security. The website's terms of service, last modified on 28 February 2023, do not name a company or a jurisdiction, so there is no identified legal entity a user contracts with.

CAKE is the project's token. Holders vote on proposals through PancakeSwap's voting portal, and since the Tokenomics 3.0 upgrade in 2025 the token's design centers on burning supply rather than on paying holders.

Several pool designs run side by side, and PancakeSwap's Smart Router splits a trade across them to find the best price. The docs say it draws on v3, v2 and StableSwap pools and, on BNB Chain and Ethereum, on professional market makers who quote prices directly; a trade filled by a market maker does not touch the AMM pools.

• v2: the original design, with liquidity spread across all prices and a flat 0.25% fee.
• v3: concentrated liquidity, where providers choose a price range and receive a transferable NFT for each position.
• StableSwap: pools for assets meant to trade near the same price, such as two dollar stablecoins.
• Infinity: the newest version, with all pools in one contract and "hooks" that run custom code such as dynamic fees. It supports concentrated-liquidity pools and liquidity-book pools, where liquidity sits in discrete price bins.

Beyond spot trading, PancakeSwap Perpetuals now runs on Aster's order-book infrastructure and offers up to 200x leverage on BTC, according to the docs. The Prediction game lets users bet on whether BNB, BTC or ETH will rise or fall in five-minute rounds, and the Lottery sells tickets for CAKE prizes. Both are optional, and both are games of chance rather than ways to trade.

A swap pays the pool's fee, which is included in the quote, plus the network's gas fee. The swap screen shows the fee charged and the route, including the pool type and fee tier each leg uses. On EVM networks, v3 fees are split between liquidity providers, a CAKE burn and the treasury.

v2 pools charge 0.25% per swap, of which 0.17% goes back to liquidity providers. On Solana, PancakeSwap's concentrated-liquidity pools offer tiers from 0.01% to 4%, split 84% to providers, 8% to the burn and 8% to the treasury.

As with other exchanges, the tier is not what most volume pays. Over the 30 days to 14 July 2026 we measured an average of 0.0651% of volume paid in fees; the same calculation on DefiLlama's figures for the 30 days to 29 October 2026 gives about 0.050%. Most volume sits in low-fee pools on BNB Chain, where gas is also cheap. Our guide to the cheapest way to swap crypto explains why total cost, including price impact, is the figure to compare. Perpetuals, the lottery and the prediction game carry their own fees, set out in the docs for each product.

In April 2025 PancakeSwap retired veCAKE, its lock-to-vote model, along with gauge voting and the 5% share of trading fees that had gone to veCAKE holders. From 7 May 2025 that money was redirected to the CAKE burn. Users who had locked CAKE directly had until 23 October 2025 to redeem it.

The stated target is net deflation of at least about 4% a year and a cut of about 20% in total supply by 2030. Burns come from 15 to 23% of spot trading fees, 20% of perpetuals profits, all CAKE.PAD fees and 20% of CAKE played in the lottery, while new CAKE is still emitted to farms, the lottery and ecosystem growth. A proposal passed in January 2026 lowered the hard cap from 450 million to 400 million CAKE. Whether the burn outpaces emissions in a given week can be checked on the Dune dashboard the docs link to.

PancakeSwap does not hold user funds: swaps and liquidity positions stay in the user's wallet or in the pool contracts, and its terms say it has no custody of, or ability to move, what is in a user's wallet. There is no deposit insurance and no company to claim against.

The contracts have been audited many times, and the docs list each report. Infinity's core and periphery contracts were audited in 2024 and its Universal Router by Cyfrin in 2025; v3 and MasterChef v3 by PeckShield and SlowMist in 2023; StableSwap by SlowMist in 2022; the aggregator router by BlockSec in 2025; and the CAKE token by HashDit in 2026. An Immunefi bug bounty, live since March 2021, pays up to $1 million for critical contract bugs, capped at 5% of funds at risk, and up to $7,500 for critical website bugs. Audits reduce risk; they do not remove it.

The risks that matter most to a user sit around the contracts:

• Front-end attacks. In March 2021 attackers hijacked the site's DNS and asked visitors for seed phrases. PancakeSwap will never ask for one; use a bookmark.
• Token risk. Anyone can create a pool, including for tokens built to block selling. Check what you approve; our explainer on token approvals covers revoking old ones.
• Chain risk. Most liquidity lives on BNB Chain, where 21 validators produce blocks each epoch out of 45 active ones. That is a smaller set than on Ethereum, and the security of the pools rests on it.
• Hooks. Infinity pools can run custom hook code, which the docs show on each pool's page under Pool Features.
• Leverage and games. Perpetuals at up to 200x, prediction rounds and the lottery can lose a stake quickly; they are separate from swapping.

Swaps need only a self-custody wallet; there is no sign-up or KYC, and the terms say the site provides access to a decentralized protocol. Users must confirm they are not on a sanctions list such as OFAC's.

The one explicit country list in the terms applies to Initial Farm Offerings, PancakeSwap's token-sale events. Residents of the United States and its territories, New Zealand, Belarus, Cuba, the Crimea region, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Zimbabwe may not take part. The terms also state that PancakeSwap is not registered with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in any capacity.

To swap on BNB Chain you need a wallet such as MetaMask or Trust Wallet, some BNB for gas and the token you want to sell; the docs have separate setup guides for Solana, Aptos and Monad. Connect the wallet at pancakeswap.finance, choose the pair, check the price impact and fee in the swap details, and confirm. A first sale of a token needs an approval transaction.

A swap's output arrives in your wallet in the same transaction. Liquidity providers can remove liquidity at any time; on v3, fees are not compounded into the position and have to be claimed from the position page, and a position whose range the price has left earns nothing until the price returns. Anyone who still holds CAKE in the retired veCAKE system should follow the docs' Staked Cake Redemption guide.

Help comes through the docs' troubleshooting pages, the official Telegram and Discord communities, and announcements on X at @pancakeswap and on the PancakeSwap blog. The docs are blunt about impersonation: nobody from PancakeSwap will ever send a direct message, and anyone posing as support on Telegram should be blocked and reported. Nobody legitimate will ask for a private key or recovery phrase.

Because there is no account, support cannot recover funds sent to a wrong address or reverse a swap.

PancakeSwap's development record is mostly a sequence of product versions and token changes.

• September 2020: launch on Binance Smart Chain; the core and farm contract repositories are created that month.
• March 2021: DNS hijack of the front end; contracts unaffected. The Immunefi bug bounty starts the same month.
• 2023: Exchange v3 with concentrated liquidity, audited by PeckShield and SlowMist.
• 2024 to 2025: Infinity, the hooks-based version, is audited and rolled out.
• April to May 2025: Tokenomics 3.0 retires veCAKE and redirects revenue sharing to the burn.
• January 2026: the CAKE hard cap is cut to 400 million.
• By October 2026: perpetuals run on Aster's infrastructure, and the docs list eleven networks, including Monad and Robinhood Chain.

For a comparison with other venues, see how PancakeSwap compares with other decentralized exchanges, or read our profile of Uniswap, the largest alternative.