The ETH VS BSC duel has been going on for a little while now and the most notable is with their frontrunners Uniswap VS Pancake.
I have been following the data on the both chains and platforms for a while now and even made the animated line chart race ETH VS BSC in terms of transactions, where BSC has already overtaken ETH.
Now let’s take a look at the Uniswap VS Pancake data laid out side by side.
Before going further into the post I just want to note here that while these comparison THIS VS THAT are fun and interesting, the overall sentiment (and data) is that we are still early on in this space so there is enough space for growth for all the platforms and much more new ones that will come out in the future.
The pro and cons of these two are clear, Uniswap being decentralized (more secure) but expensive in terms of fees, while Pancake is cheap in fees at a cost of centralization.
Here we will be looking at:
- Total Value Locked TVL
- Trading Volume
- Numbers of users
- Top pairs
- Price
The period that we will be looing at is form September 2020 to February 2021.
Historical Data on Total Value Lock on Uniswap VS Pancake
Here is the chart.
Note: I wasn’t able to find clean data on TVL on Pancake so it’s a rough representation.
Uni clear in the lead here with Pancake catching up fast.
As we can see up to January 2021 the TVL on Pancake was quite small in terms of hundred of millions. Then in January it started to grow and really exploding in February 2021, reaching more than three billion.
Uniswap had some up and downs in the period, but much more stable than Pancake, starting with around 2B in September 2020, reaching a 3B, then a drop and the a growth since December 2020 to February 2021 reaching a five billions in TVL. In the last week or two the TVL on Uniswap has dropped a bit.
In the whole period above Pancake has never got close to Uniswap in terms of TVL.
Here are the numbers for TVL as of March 4, 2021.
| March 4, 2021 | TVL |
|---|---|
| Uniswap | 4,590,829,710 |
| Pancake | 3,081,494,879 |
Uniswap is basically seating at 50% more in TVL than Pancake.
Will be interesting if at some point in the future both of these numbers are in 100x 😊.
Trading Volume
Here is the chart for the trading volume.
This one is a bit more interesting than the TVL. We can see here the explosive growth on Pancake in February 2021 surpassing the trading volume on Uniswap. Pancake has reached a record high trading volume on February 23rd with 2.8 billion. It has dropped afterwards to around 1B.
Uniswap has a steady growth in the whole period with a small drop in the last week or two. It also had the ATH in trading volume on February 23rd with 1.7B.
The latest numbers looks like this.
| March 4, 2021 | Trading Volume |
|---|---|
| Uniswap | 821,000,000 |
| Pancake | 961,584,707 |
The trading volume has been volatile on both platform in the last weeks with these to swapping the no.1 position all the time.
A note on the trading volume. Unlike the TVL where capital is locked in smart contracts, the trading volume can be played a bit with wash trading. Since the fees are smaller on BSC its cheaper to wash trade there. It also can be happening on Uniswap as well. The main point here is that the trading volume should be taking with some reserves due to possible wash trading. Still more legit than most of the CEXs where the trading is on a central servers and zero fees 😊.
Numbers of users
This is an interesting chart as well. Pancake has overtaken Uniswap by a lot in terms of numbers of users, and its having an up trend, while the numbers of active wallets are down on Uniswap.
This might be mainly because of the low fees on BSC, where more can afford them, while the high fees on ETH are just for large users.
At the moment things stands like this:
- In TVL the winner is Uniswap
- In terms of trading volume it’s a draw
- In numbers of wallets the winner is Pancake
This is the current situation and as we know in crypto it can change fast.
Top Pairs
Here is the table for the top 10 pairs on March 5, 2021.
| No | Uniswap | Liquidity | Pancake | Liquidity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ETH-BTC | 364,365,253 | BNB-CAKE | 429,601,883 | |
| 2 | ETH-USDC | 239,460,912 | BNB-BUSD | 131,410,307 | |
| 3 | ETH-WISE | 192,335,297 | BNB-BTC | 72,248,426 | |
| 4 | ETH-RAI | 187,797,639 | BNB-AUTO | 67,186,571 | |
| 5 | ETH-USDT | 182,123,940 | BNB-ETH | 54,503,616 | |
| 6 | ETH-UNI | 161,586,379 | BUSDT-USDT | 51,213,744 | |
| 7 | ETH-DAI | 130,819,708 | BNB-DOT | 40,541,723 | |
| 8 | HKMT-USDT | 105,359,351 | BUSD-VAI | 35,970,712 | |
| 9 | FRAX-USDC | 95,762,620 | BNB-UNI | 33,427,493 | |
| 10 | ETH-LINK | 88,356,396 | BNB-USDT | 31,329,954 |
Note that the Pancake interface is out of sync at the moment, so the numbers are probably slightly bigger than the above.
What can be concluded from the above is that on Uniswap we have a more even distribution in the top 10 pairs, starting from 364M going to 88M. On Pancake the liquidity is more concentrated in the top two pairs, BNB-CAKE and BNB-BUSD, especially in the no.1 that is closing to a 500M and has more liquidity than the no.1 pair ETH-BTC on Uniswap.
Out of the top 10 pairs on Uniswap, eight are paired with ETH. On Pancake out of the top 10 also eight are paired with BNB.
In terms of price both tokens have performed extremely well. UNI has traded at 4$ on October 1, 2020 and now is around 27$. CAKE has traded around 0.4$ and now is 11$.
Both of these platforms have updates on the roadmaps.
Defi has really been the hot thing in crypto in the last six months. Will be interesting to see how things go in 2021.
