PancakeSwap

PancakeSwap launched in 2020 as an automated market maker on Binance Smart Chain, now BNB Chain. It has never named its founders. The team calls itself "the Chefs" and hires openly through its docs, where in September 2026 it listed engineering, business-development and prediction-market roles (PancakeSwap docs). Wikipedia notes that its domain was registered in Shanghai, and cites former Binance employees who say the project began inside Binance (Wikipedia). PancakeSwap has not confirmed this.

It is now a product suite on several chains rather than a single DEX: spot swaps through a Smart Router that also pulls quotes from market makers, v3 and Infinity liquidity pools, StableSwap, perpetual futures, a CAKE lottery and token launches (CAKE.PAD). In June 2025 it partnered with World Liberty Financial to promote the USD1 stablecoin with a liquidity programme offering up to $1 million in prizes.

PancakeSwap is non-custodial for swaps and LPing, but it has no named legal entity or accountable executives. You can see what its contracts do. You cannot see who decides to change them.

Infinity is PancakeSwap's fourth-generation AMM, the equivalent of Uniswap v4. One singleton contract holds every pool, balances settle at the end of a transaction (flash accounting), native tokens need no wrapping, and each pool can attach hooks: external code that runs at points in a pool's lifecycle, for example to set a dynamic fee (PancakeSwap docs).

For LPs, the same rule applies as elsewhere. A hooked pool is only as trustworthy as its hook, and a concentrated position that leaves its range stops earning. Most liquidity had not moved to Infinity by September 2026, so the older pools still set the depth of most pairs (DefiLlama).

On EVM chains a v3 swap pays the pool's tier, from 0.01% to 1%, per hop. Unlike Uniswap before its fee switch, PancakeSwap has always kept a cut of that fee for itself (PancakeSwap docs):

The burn share is the core of CAKE Tokenomics 3.0. The stated target is net deflation of about 4% a year and a total supply reduction of about 20% by 2030. Burns come from spot fees, 20% of perpetuals profit, 20% of CAKE played in the lottery and all CAKE.PAD fees. In January 2026 governance cut CAKE's hard cap from 450 million to 400 million (CAKE Tokenomics). CAKE supply data is on our market page.

Gas is where PancakeSwap wins on cost. A swap on BNB Chain costs cents, so a 0.25% pool on a $100 trade costs about 25 cents in all. On Ethereum mainnet, gas alone can cost more than that.

1. 01Type pancakeswap.finance yourself or use a bookmark. The domain was hijacked in March 2021, and copycat sites are common.
2. 02Connect a self-custody wallet on the chain you want (BNB Chain is the default) and keep some BNB for gas.
3. 03Before you swap, open the route view. It shows which pools and fee tiers the Smart Router picked, or whether a market maker is filling the order instead.
4. 04Keep slippage tight on liquid pairs. Raise it only for tokens with transfer taxes, and treat any token that needs 20%+ slippage as a warning sign.
5. 05Paste the token's contract address instead of searching by name. Fake tokens copy tickers of real ones all the time.
6. 06Revoke old approvals you no longer need.

The incident record is short but real. Besides the 2021 DNS hijack, the CAKE lottery lost about $1.8M in April 2021 through an access-control flaw. Neither touched the swap pools. Most losses PancakeSwap users actually suffer come from scam tokens and phishing, not from the contracts. The PancakeSwap card scores custody and cost against other DEXs.

• Infinity: the fourth-generation AMM is live, with CLAMM, LBAMM and StableSwap pool types and open-source hooks. It held about $77M by September 2026.
• June 2025: partnership with World Liberty Financial to promote USD1 liquidity on PancakeSwap.
• 16 January 2026: governance proposal to cut the CAKE hard cap from 450M to 400M; it passed.
• Solana and RWAs: v3 CLMM pools on Solana offer 18 fee tiers from 0.01% to 4%, and the docs now describe a shared-inventory hook designed for tokenised real-world assets.