PancakeSwap native chain is Binance Smart Chain BSC and has been the main driver behind the growth of DeFi on that chain. In time 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 during the bear market of 2022-2023. In 2025 the protocol has shown some new signs of growth!
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 in September 2020 to 9B in April 2021. A sharp drop afterwards to around 1.5B At the end of 2023.
Since then, there has been some small increase in TVL, first in April 2024, and just recently again in September 2025 reaching almost 3B. But still far from the previous heights of 2021.
Trading Volume
Here is the chart for the trading volume on a monthly basis.
The trading volume has seen an even bigger drop than the TVL in 2023. A massive increase at the start, a drop, but now again we are seeing an increase again in 2025, reaching 100B in trading volume per months.
The overall BSC ecosystem had some revival in 2025.
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 8th spot. Still not bad for a non ETH DEX to even show up as a top exchange in the world. Somewhere around 1B trading volume per day these days.
Numbers of Users
The chart for the Pancake users looks like this.
Here again we can notice the massive spike at first, going for 800k DAUs in 2021, a drop to under 100k in 2023, and a massive increase in 2025, reaching a new ATH to 1M DAUs.
This shows that 2025 has been a good year for BSC and Pancake.
Top Pairs
Here is the table for the top 10 pairs in September 2023.
The stablecoins pairs are on the top here with four of them sitting in the top five. USDT-BNB comes in the fourth spot, with USDT-BTC and one more USDT-USD1 in the top 1 as well.
Overall the top pools are dominated by the stablecoins, BNB and BTC. A while back there was some meme and defi tokens, but obviously all them have fallen back these days.
CAKE Supply
Initially CAKE had 40 tokens per block inflation, then they reduce it to 25 to 15 and as of late 2023 to just 0.71 tokens per block. CAKE now has supply cap of 450M. Prior it was at 750M but was reduced.
The overall goal is for the CAKE token to be deflationary.
The chart looks like this:
A 350M tokens in circulation now.
We can notice that after 2023 the token has been deflationary going from close to 400M to 350M now. So a reduction in the supply of 50M.
We can also see that at first it was highly inflationary, but started at zero, with no premines and all the rewards went to LPs.
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 USD in 2023.
Since then, the token had a few rallies going up to $5 for a moment, on a few occasions, with the last pump in September 2025. Currently the token is at 1.8 USD and is still valued relative low when compared against the previous period.
