PancakeSwap Overtakes Uniswap in Trading Volume as Binance Smart Chain Explodes

Binance Smart Chain-based decentralized exchange, PancakeSwap has become the industry’s largest DEX by trading volume with roughly $1.5 billion traded in the last 24 hours. In the process, PancakeSwap overtook Ethereum-based Uniswap, which has retained the top spot for a long time.

As the above data from industry-tracker, Coingecko shows, the rise of PancakeSwap above Uniswap has happened even with the DEX listing fewer coins and pairs and having fewer visitors. The project’s native token, CAKE, trades at $18.5 at the time of writing, representing an over 200% growth in the last seven days.

The recent implosion of PancakeSwap follows a period when Ethereum network fees have hit the roof, and users are looking for alternatives.

PancakeSwap is a fork of Uniswap protocol but built on Binance Smart Chain, an Ethereum-sidechain largely pioneered by Binance exchange. Binance Smart Chain offers significantly lower fees, around $0.10 per transaction, and near-instant settlements, and has seen significant usage in the wake of the Ethereum fee hike.

In the hours leading up to press time, the number of transactions on the Binance Smart Chain has overtaken Ethereum. While BSC reports almost 2.5 million transactions, Ethereum lags with 1.3 million transactions in the last 24 hours.

Binance Coin (BNB) Breaks Into Top 3

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has in the past shrugged off the possibility of Binance’s blockchain efforts becoming the ultimate “Ethereum killer.” However, the meteoric increase in the past few days brings that subject back in contention, with the Binance native token (BNB) breaking into the top three cryptocurrencies by market cap.

BNB had a $257 price and the time of writing, while its market cap of $38.1 billion has overtaken Tether’s stablecoin, USDT as the third-largest cryptocurrency in the market.

Aside from the existing use cases, BNB is being used to pay gas fees on the Binance Smart Chain, with the rise in transactions inevitable, meaning greater demand for the token.

But BNB still trails Ethereum’s Ether (ETH) by some mile. The latter has a $221 billion market cap and recently broke above the $1900 price for the first time.