Earlier this weekend, decentralized crypto exchange (DEX) PancakeSwap announced on 4 March that a new version (V3) of this application is slated to be rolled out for users in the month of April.
The pseudonymous "head chef" of PancakeSwap, Mochi announced,
“The new features we're introducing will offer our users an even better experience and help make DeFi accessible to more people than ever before."
According to the company's press release, the launch of PancakeSwap Version 3 is going to happen in the first week of April, and it is going to contain a slew of upgrades to the services provided by the DEX, including more competitive trading fees and an improved liquidity provisioning in the exchange.
It is also slated to have a rewards campaign that coincides with the launch of the updated PancakeSwap exchange that will give users an airdrop of the exchange's CAKE token if they contribute a certain amount of funds to the platform's liquidity pools!
The press release also stated that users providing liquidity on the platform within the campaign's requirements will also receive an NFT that would serve as a symbol of loyalty towards PancakeSwap. However, it did contain a disclaimer that the token is non-transferable, thus can't be sold and the campaign can be modified or canceled at any time.
🚀PancakeSwap V3 is launching on the 1st week of April!
— PancakeSwap 🥞 #Multichain (@PancakeSwap) March 4, 2023
🎁Early supporters will receive an exclusive NFT and a share of the $135K airdrop
⏰Don't miss out on this opportunity and join us now by adding liquidity on BSC PancakeSwap
📕Full details here: https://t.co/5QjGWOxd3g pic.twitter.com/2dpFKZwcms
This news was warmly welcomed by industry participants and leaders in the space. Neeraj Khandelwal, co-founder at Okto DeFi App and CoinDCX, India's biggest crypto exchange also took to Twitter to laud the announcement as a step in the right direction!
#PancakeSwap V3 on #BNB Smart Chain could be a huge step towards making #DeFi accessible to all! Their promise of lower fees, faster transactions and customizable fee structure is already attracting a lot of attention and may speed up mass adoption!
— Neeraj, CoinDCX (@nrjkhandelwal) March 6, 2023
Will have to wait and watch!
This is a significant development coming out of the fourth most popular decentralized exchange with a little over $80 million in trading volumes in the past 24 hours, with about 5.4% market share by volume - according to data from CoinGecko.
PancakeSwap also saw one of the biggest deployments on Aptos, where it currently has over $30.3 million in total-value-locked (TVL). Further, according to data from DefiLlama, its TVL in DeFi stands at a sum of $2.48 billion as of writing this article, with the biggest contributor being the BNB Smart Chain at $2.43 billion.
However, PancakeSwap's native crypto token CAKE has taken a beating in the markets of late. CAKE had a strong beginning to the new year with the value of the crypto asset gaining almost 50% in the first month and a half, going from $3.15 to nearly $4.8 in the first week of February. However, since then CAKE has been suffering a lot of selling pressures, especially amid the news around Binance and it has fallen over 22% from those highs and is currently trading at about $3.8. It had touched it's all-time high (ATH) at $44 back in April 2021. It currently has a market cap of a little over $704 million and is ranked #69 on CoinMarketCap.
PancakeSwap is a DEX that was launched back in September 2020 by a group of anonymous developers. It was built on the BNB Smart Chain, and not on Ethereum as is the case with Uniswap. BNB Smart Chain is a standalone blockchain that was created by Binance, with smart contract functionalities too, and is the third largest chain by TVL in DeFi - according to data from DefiLlama.
Values as on 6 March 2023.
