The Number One DEX on BSC - PancakeSwap in Decline | Data on TVL, Volume, Users, Supply and More

PancakeSwap native chain is Binance Smart Chain BSC and has been the main driver behind the growth of DeFi on that chain. Recently they have expanded to other chains as well, but the liquidity there is still very small.

Pancake had a remarkable growth in the previous bull market, together with the overall Biance Smart Chain ecosystem. But as with most DeFi, Pancake took a big hit and most of the parameters are down these days.

Let’s take a look at some of the data!

The centralization aspect of BSC always will remain as a con, but for what is worth Pancake started with no presale, no premine etc. All the tokens in circulation were distributed as rewards to the users and liquidity providers on the platform.

Here we will be looking at:

• Total value locked TVL
• Trading volume
• Numbers of users
• Top pairs
• Inflation
• Price

PancakeSwap has been around since September 2020, but we will take a closer look at the last year.

Total Value Lock TVL on Pancake

Here is the chart.

An explosive growth in the first six months of the platform. Starting from zero to 9B in April 2021. A sharp drop afterwards to around 4B in the summer of 2021. A growth since then to 6.5B at the end of 2021 and a constant drop since then, to 1.3B TVL where we are now. At the beginning of 2023 there was around 2.3B, so a drop of 1B in the year.

Trading Volume

Here is the chart for the trading volume.

The trading volume has seen an even bigger drop than the TVL.
Back in the days there was a trading volume in the billions, but in the last year this has dropped to less than 100M. In the last month the average trading volume per day is around 16M.

DEX VS CEX Volume

If we take a look at the data for the trading volume on the other exchanges provided by some of the aggregators like coingecko the numbers look like this.

We can notice that Pancake is just entering this ranking around the 10th place. Uniswap for example is higher on the ranks around the 5th spot. Still not bad for a non ETH DEX to even show up as an top exchanges in the world.

Numbers of Users

The chart for the Pancake users looks like this.

The downtrend is obvious here as well. From more than 700k DAUs at the end of 2021, and a constant drop since then to around 100k DAUs these days. Although it seems that in the last year the number of DAUs has stabilized around the 100k mark. Even with this sharp drop, 100k users daily is still a solid number for a crypto project.

Top Pairs

Here is the table for the top 10 pairs in September 2023.

The BNB-USDT pair is on the top with 65M in liquidity.
Interesting the ELEPHANT-BUSD pool is on the second spot, that is totally unknow token for me. Next there are a few stablecoins pair like USDT-USDC and BUSD-USDT.
What’s interesting is that in the past the BNB-CAKE pool was a number one pool but has dropped significantly since then. CAKE has lost a lot of value and is being staked as a single token these days.

CAKE Supply

Here is the chart for the CAKE supply.

CAKE inflation is a bit wonky with print to burn coins.

Initially CAKE had a 40 tokens per block inflation, then they reduce it to 25 and again to 15 tokens per block. The thing is the reduction in the inflation is not effective but, the difference is printed and then burned. Also, there are burnings from lottery, IFOs, prediction markets, account registrations etc.
If we take the effective supply only, we get this.

A 390M tokens in circulation now. We can notice that inflation has slowed down in the last year, especially since March 2023. The token supply has increased from 370M to 380M in the last six months. This is less than a 3% inflation, and overall, the year will probably end with less than 10% inflation. This is a significant reduction from the initial inflation in the first years, when the inflation was in the multiple hundreds.
The team behind CAKE has stated that their long-term vision is to make CAKE inflation neutral and the token is now close to that, might even become deflationary at some point.

Monthly Burned CAKE

The chart for the burns on a monthly level looks like this.

We can notice an overall uptrend here.
Note that a lot of these tokens comes from tokens that should not been released in the first place and it is more of a marketing strategy.
The part that is important is CAKE that is burnt from trading fees and some other mechanics, like lottery etc.

Price

At the end the chart for the price.

An extreme chart in terms of the token price. An explosive growth few years back, to more than $40 and then a massive drop to just 1.15 USD where the token is now. In terms of market cap, the token is now outside the top 100.
The overall drop in the value of the DeFi tokens in combination with the overall FUD around the Binance ecosystem have contributed to the CAKE token to be smashed in value with more than 95% drop in value. Will it ever recover? Only time will tell!

All the best
@dalz

Posted Using LeoFinance Alpha