PancakeSwap April/May Recap

8 min readMay 25, 2021

👋 Hey there Pancake Flippers!

Boy, what a week for crypto. The good news is, whichever way the market flips, the Chefs keep working harder than ever to cook up new products and updates.

Starting this month, we’re going to start sharing more regular monthly updates on what’s going on in the PancakeSwap Kitchen.

We’ll start with a recap of the last month for starters, then for the main course, we’ll give you a sneak peek at what’s next on our to-do list.

Who’s hungry? 👀

Recap

April 2021

Total unique site users: 11M+
Total unique wallet users: 1.87M+
Total volume: $39.7B USD
Average daily volume: $1.3B USD
25 Syrup Pools ($17.95M USD in additional income for CAKE stakers)

May 2021 (So far)

Total unique site users: 14.5M+
Total unique wallet users: 2.9M+
Total volume: $50B+ USD
Average daily volume: $2.2B USD
20 Syrup Pools ($10M USD in additional income for CAKE stakers)

In case you’re wondering, that’s a lot.

Latest Releases

Sounds good, but what value did they actually add?

Something to the tune of $38.5M USD worth of CAKE BURNED in only 45 days.

Every trade on V2 burns CAKE: the migration to V2 has already led to over $23.5M USD of CAKE being bought back from the market and burned so far.
IFO V2 has generated an additional $8M USD of CAKE in fees so far (all burned).
Prediction accumulated over $3.5M USD in fees in the short time it was live, which was used to buy back CAKE from the market and burn it.
The Auto-Compounding CAKE Syrup Pool has earned $560k+ USD, which was used to buy back CAKE from the market and burn it.
During the Easter Battle trading volume increased between 3–10x on each pair! (we’ll get ’em next time Flippers!)

In addition to the above, the profile and NFT gamification contributed $2.9M USD in CAKE to the burn pool and the Boost Syrup Pool offering generated $975k USD additional income for CAKE stakers!

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re building CAKE-burning mechanisms into more and more areas of our product lineup.

Anyway, that’s enough of the past, let’s get into what lies ahead. There are quite a few updates/sneak peeks below, so we will try to keep each as concise as possible:

What’s next?

Info & Analytics: to relaunch in 1 to 2 weeks

We’ll start with something you’ve all been waiting for: PancakeSwap’s info and analytics site is finally coming back to life. Expect a fully synced relaunch within the next 2 weeks, with our own added flair to it.

Prediction Beta v0.2: to launch in 2 to 3 weeks

Prediction. Yes, we know you love it, and we do too.

The initial Beta release of PancakeSwap Prediction has received more enthusiasm than we could have anticipated (which is a good thing), and also helped reveal a few pain points on the user experience side.

In addition to having a couple of tweaks to test over the next week or two, we’re also actively working with Chainlink to bring down the latency of price updates among other things, to take prediction to the next level.

You might have even missed one sneaky update we made during the beta so far: In the history tab, you can now view your overall PnL (wins and losses)! Share yours with #PancakeSwap.

In the meantime, we’ve unpaused the existing prediction beta to continue gathering more valuable feedback — start playing now!

Lottery: to relaunch in 3 to 4 weeks

Work is well underway for the new Lottery smart contract and interface. It’s going to be a totally new experience, with a whole new ruleset and loads of performance and cost upgrades.

We’re really excited about some of the upgrades:

Much lower price per ticket: The ticket price will be closer to around $3 (not finalized yet). The aim is $1, but that might not make sense in relation to the cost of gas fees per ticket.
Much lower gas fees: Making 50 tickets in the old Lottery system could cost you as much as $37 in fees. We’re estimating we can reduce that to as little as $14 for 50 tickets in the new system and we’re working on getting it even lower! (These examples are based on 1 BNB = $350)
Choose your own ticket numbers: You’ll be able to manually select your ticket numbers directly in the UI. What are your lucky numbers?
All-new gameplay: The way you win is going to change. Here’s how it’ll work:

Each ticket has 6 digits.
You must match the winning number in order, starting from the first number.
The more numbers you match in order, the higher your prize bracket. Here’s the breakdown:

We still need to wait for an audit of the new lottery contract to be completed, but we’re targeting 3–4 weeks for the grand relaunch of the lottery… and you’re all invited! 🥳

Don’t forget, since the lottery has been on pause, we’ve been collecting tons of CAKE for the prize pool. That means the prizes at the start of the new version are likely to be absolutely massive.

Voting: to launch in 1 to 2 weeks

You might have noticed that the voting portal has been experiencing scaling issues as the use cases for CAKE have increased. Basically, the more potential uses for CAKE, the harder it becomes for third-party voting solutions to cover our needs. To solve this, we’ve got a brand new UI coming which utilizes an internal solution and will finally allow CAKE holders to cast their votes with ease (it looks pretty too).

Docs & Guides

With the massive influx of new users came the apparent realization that PancakeSwap’s docs were completely neglected and worst of all, barely helpful to any lost rabbit looking to find their way.

Chef Tantalus recently joined the team as a Technical Writer and is actively both adding to and improving everything on offer.

Check out the docs site in its current form here

Once we’re happy with the initial version, the main content will be fully translated to: Español, Русский, 日本語, 中文, Français, Bahasa Indonesia, Tiếng Việt, Italiano, Português and Türkçe.

Trading Competitions as a Service

PancakeSwap’s first team trading competition, the Easter Battle, saw a huge uptake from the community and hugely boosted the trading volume on the exchange. We’re now building a solution that will open up the volume-generating possibilities of trading competitions to other BSC projects: trading competitions as a service.

And remember… the more trading that happens on PancakeSwap V2, the more CAKE that gets burned!
If you’re a project that is already on PancakeSwap’s default list, you can reach out to @chef_roo on Telegram to learn more about what it entails.

Portfolio & Dashboard

Thanks to the thousands of you who recently took part in our recent user survey this week, we’ve got some great data to help us create a new dashboard and portfolio system.

You’ll be able to view and manage your farms, pools, and other PancakeSwap holdings all in one page.

No real teaser image for this one yet: we’re still at the wireframing stage.

V2 Exchange UI

Following hot on the heels of the new V2 exchange contract rollout, we’re preparing a few updates to the look and feel of the swap and liquidity management interface.

These updates will be rolling out over the coming days. All steps on the road towards the next big addition…

Simple Liquidity

One of the biggest hurdles for newcomers to DeFi is understanding the concept of liquidity pools and LP tokens. We’re preparing solutions to streamline the user experience of liquidity provision, especially for farms, with a few twists that you may not have seen on other platforms with similar features.

Long story short, you’ll be able to easily and instantly add liquidity for any token pair, via other tokens.

Mobile Navigation

In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve added a ton of new features since PancakeSwap started, and the existing navigation structure can be really overwhelming for newcomers. Where to begin?!

To solve that, we’re working on a more streamlined and goal-oriented navigation system, designed especially with mobile users in mind.

Crypto OGs who haven’t explored mobile wallet dapp browsers yet might be surprised to find out that the majority of PancakeSwap’s users are now visiting the site on mobile devices. We’ve always recognized the mobile market as the future of crypto adoption, and our data supports this. That’s why we’ll be continuing to optimize the user experience with mobile users as a priority.

NFT Profile System & Gamification

As of today there are over 227,000 unique profiles, and the first-ever team battle was incredibly successful.

We’ll be continuing to make unique NFTdrops, and we’re currently working on the points ecosystem (spending/redeeming etc).

We’re also still planning to open-source the task/achievement framework and host competitions (hackathons) with CAKE prizes/grants to the best devs.

One spoiler/hint to what may be coming next lies below. Few.

🤫 Shhhh, It’s a Secret.

In addition to all of the above, there are a few other things we’re actively working on but are keeping under wraps for now! You can expect an update on our “not a roadmap” come June 1st.

Finally, we’d like to take the chance to introduce a few new members of the PancakeSwap team:

🐰 Chef Cheems — FE Engineer

🐰 Chef Yuna — UI/UX

🐰 Chef Cecy — 3D Artist

🦆 Chef Nina — Duck in disguise

🐰 Chef Tantalus — Technical Writer

Stack’em!

The PancakeSwap Team 🐰🥞

P.S. Hiring — We’re still looking for best engineers to join the PancakeSwap team:

Solidity
Back-end
QA Blockchain

(Check out all of the open positions and details here)