PancakeSwap Confirms CAKE Tokenomics 3.0 Launch on April 23 Despite Community Outcry
PancakeSwap, the largest decentralized exchange platform on the BNB Chain ecosystem, has set April 23, 2025 as the official launch date for CAKE Tokenomics 3.0. This move marks a major shift towards a more sustainable development model, with a focus on deflation, optimizing the intrinsic value of the CAKE token.
Major changes in tokenomics strategy
CAKE Tokenomics 3.0 is designed with three core goals: maintaining an annual deflation rate of 4%, eliminating complex models such as veCAKE, and reducing CAKE emissions in stages. The entire plan is to support long-term value and sustainability for the ecosystem.
Specifically, PancakeSwap will completely stop staking CAKE and the veCAKE system — which has been the basis for voting rights and rewards on the platform. Users who have locked CAKE will have their entire holdings unlocked, and they will have six months from the launch date to withdraw their assets.
Instead of sharing transaction fees with users, PancakeSwap will focus on burning tokens to reduce the circulating supply. An estimated 5.3 million CAKE will be burned each year. The daily CAKE emission will also be adjusted from 29,000 to 20,000, and will continue to decrease to 14,500 in the near future.
Community divided over reform
While most investors and veteran developers appreciate this new direction, arguing that it will protect real value and encourage long-term holding, not everyone agrees.
One of the most scathing reactions came from Cakepie DAO – an organization that once held a large amount of veCAKE and built an entire ecosystem around the veToken model. According to them, PancakeSwap’s unilateral removal of veCAKE was a lack of transparency, causing the entire project that depended on veCAKE to fall into crisis.
“We locked up millions of CAKE for four years to show our trust in PancakeSwap. Now, that entire commitment is being erased overnight,” a Cakepie representative shared.
To calm the reaction, PancakeSwap proposed a compensation package worth $1.5 million in CAKE for the community holding CKP (Cakepie’s governance token). Accordingly, if Cakepie accepts, users can swap 1:1 from mCAKE (a derivative version issued by Cakepie) to the official CAKE.
Cakepie DAO is currently holding an internal vote to decide whether to approve the proposal.
Positive market impact
Despite the controversy, news of CAKE Tokenomics 3.0 has contributed to a sharp increase in CAKE prices. Since April 8 – when PancakeSwap first announced its reform plan – CAKE prices have increased by 17%, currently trading around $1.97.
According to data from DeFiLlama, 24-hour trading volume on PancakeSwap has surpassed $1 billion, surpassing Uniswap. This is a positive sign that trust is still being maintained among the BNB Chain user community, where PancakeSwap currently controls more than 90% of the DEX market share.
CAKE Tokenomics 3.0 may be a bold but necessary step to take PancakeSwap to a new stage of development. Although it has encountered many controversies, the actual results will be the clearest answer to the long-term vision that the project is pursuing.