DeFi Deep Dive: Binance Chain Darling PancakeSwap

[EAA-ALLAH]

PancakeSwap is a relatively new platform, so it does not have much to speak of in the way of history. It was launched in mid-September 2020 on BSC as a clone of SushiSwap but offering swaps for BEP-20 tokens instead of the ERC-20 standard.
As with most platforms launched with a lot of promotion from Binance, it touted fast and cheap transactions at a time when ETH gas fees were at their highest levels.
In essence, PancakeSwap does exactly the same thing as SushiSwap, but with the advantage of being supported by a huge centralized exchange. There is a DEX, AMM, farms/pools, or kitchens as it calls them, and a native token called CAKE.
It had a lot of surreptitious shilling from Binance and its enigmatic CEO around the time of launch, but little liquidity and few tokens that people wanted to trade – Uniswap was still king.
Yield farming went live on Sept. 22, 2020, and after the first twelve hours the total value locked peaked at $35 million. By comparison, Uniswap’s TVL, at the time, was $1.8 billion.
PancakeSwap was not the only food-themed DeFi farm to be launched on BSC, as BurgerSwap and BakerySwap had also arrived on the scene the week earlier.
As ETH gas fees continued to skyrocket into 2021, reaching a peak of over $40 for an average transaction in late February, the popularity of AMM on faster chains also increased especially for newcomers to the DeFi scene. Source