tl;dr: It is a story time post. Hopefully enriching and entertaining. Give it a shot. Some humor, some facts. Breaking it straight: Price goes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Disclaimer: Opinions here are personal and biased. This is a shill to some degree. Please do not make financial decisions based on this information. I've been holding CAKE for years and have accepted that it may never recover.

Introduction: It had been a while since I posted on this sub. Legitimately one of my favorite subs in all of reddit. A beautiful spectrum ranging from brilliance to degeneracy, hopefully some of both will be present in the text that will now be laid here by me. A story about CAKE, some brief history of a leading defi project. I made an attempt to keep it high quality but not too sophisticated and to provide interesting information without being too long or boring. I hope it is as fun to read as it was fun to write.

Biased degeneracy before we start: Stack 'em, farm 'em, eat 'em. YOLO Ape in fat bags ASAP before FOMO hits. Alt season is real. Soon ATH (x16+ current price!). If 75,000 users each deploy $5,000 with 5× leverage the total buy power of $1.875 billion could push cake to an ATH where investors could easily repay their debt without crushing the price and may use their whale bags to farm syrup pools (none-biased note: psychological game theory make this scenario extremely unlikely) where people getting in at $2.5 with 5k*5 would be holding a 10k CAKE worth $440,000

// Have fun reading it. Hopefully it's bug-free. God bless.
- MasterChef.sol 09.02.2021

General history & social story:

Birth, straight out the frying pan:

It is September 2020 when an anonymous team consisting of Chef Hops, Chef Cocoa, Momo and others have forked Uniswap v2 onto BSC and CAKE was born. Fee on Ethereum were expensive and the team sought to tap into users who are looking for smaller trades. Binance immediately list CAKE, blog about it and add it to launchpool.

Octobor 2020, the "stack em" meme is born. The playfulness of the community makes CAKE a meme to a degree even though it was never officially regarded to or perceived as a meme coin and was mostly creation oriented rather than promotion oriented. Chefs, syrup, pancakes bunnies are painting an colorful auspicious dream

Explosion, Pancakes are devoured like it's a Canadian weekend morning:

Q1 2021, it is defi summer 2.0 and PancakeSwap is now the #1 DEX on BSC.
April 2021, cake hits $44 ATH. And a large selling pressure is present indicating that the team and early investors are dumping large bags. This early holders pressure continued to reappear occasionally over the years.

Updates are constant. UI is Fun. And the team blogs transparently. Over all things seem bright. "We made it", early investors are practically on the moon, greed and euphoria blinds those of us how are unfortunate enough to take profits.

Collapse, faith is lost as the narrative that sugar is bad for your health strengthens:

It is may 2022 and Terra LUNA decides to shift from committing to github to committing sudoku, the whole market is in shock (even though rational FUD was warning this could happen) as people reevaluate their life decisions. People abandon Pancakeswap, money that isn't in settling in fiat is moved to other defi projects notably of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Massive overhaul. Recovery? Do you really wanna go sugar free or do you want to be happy?

After the 2023 significant lows, lose of value and TVL that put CAKE in a "do or die" position, they did.
Updates and communication never stopped and the project survives.

2024-today. Team is focused on a new goal make CAKE a deflationary, sustainable utility token, not a farm-and-dump. And the community shows mixed reactions with some praising the changes while others complain (As they were there for the yield). Overall the release of tokens due changes that would otherwise be locked for years isn't leading to a disaster and cake shows signs of recovery alongside the general momentum in the crypto market

Technology:

My impression:

The PancakeSwap team is one of those teams that keep delivering. A large amount of contracts were forked/created, altered and deployed along the years with things being kept up to date along side innovation. Aside from contracts the platform offers a well designed UI and a stable backend. The team's centralized control over the contracts remained secure over the years.

Key features:

PancakeSwap offers swaps, yield farming via Syrup pools(Stake CAKE get some token or vice versa) and liquidity pool, lottery, NFTs, IFOs (Initial Farm Offering), prediction markets. It supports cross-chain swaps, stable pools, and perpetual futures (Infinity). A gamified retail-friendly experience originally on BSC and currently on BSC, ETH, SOL , Base, Arbitrum One, ZKsync Eea, Linea, Aptos, opBNB, Polygon zkEVM.

Notable deployments from PancakeSwap. A technological timeline:

09.2020 - Fork of Uniswap v2 on BSC. CAKE token and Syrup Pools introduced.

10.2020 - IFO model to fundraise for new projects via CAKE staking.

02.2021 - Gamified lottery system using CAKE.

04.2021 - Users could create NFT avatars and join teams.

04.2021 - PancakeSwap v2 upgrade with improved router and fee system.

05.2021 - StableSwap Pools, stablecoin-focused low slippage AMM pool, Curve-style.

09.2021 - NFT Marketplace v1 introducing the PancakeSquad NFT collection..

01.2022 - Prediction Market, binary options-style prediction system.

05.2022 - veCAKE, vote-escrowed CAKE staking with lock & governance rewards.

12.2022 - Cross-chain swaps, cross-chain routing with bridging for multi-chain trading.

03.2023 - Auto-CAKE Vault, auto-compounding CAKE staking vault.

08.2023 - NFT Marketplace v2, upgrade of NFT market with BNB/CAKE listings and royalties.

06.2024 - Partnered with Allora Network to launch an AI-driven prediction market on Arbitrum, allowing users to forecast ETH price movements.

04.2025 - Tokenomics 3.0 Deployment, CAKE emissions cut, veCAKE removed, protocol-fee-based burns. PancakeSwap Infinity launched, a decentralized perpetuals trading platform. StableSwap router upgrade. New stable router with improved capital efficiency.

A rational take on CAKE compared to the defi field:

CAKE is a user friendly, retail oriented DEX, strong in breadth but weak in deep DeFi innovation. It has fallen behind leading ETH-native protocols in TVL, dev traction, and narrative relevance. However, the recent updates including 3.0 Tokenomics and infinity indicate that the bunnies are still relevant and they are cooking.

Token price:

Milestones:

29.9.2020 - $0.0002318 All-Time Low according to CMP.

16.02.2021 – $6.00: CAKE becomes the first billion-dollar project on BSC.

30.04.2021 – $44.18 ATH: Peak price during the DeFi boom, high user engagement and enthusiasm. With noticeable sell pressure about to slam the pan causing pancakes to hit the floor while boiling oil hits bystanders.

22.06.2021 – $12.09: Price decline indicating a market correction.

22.01.2022 – $10.00: Price stabilization as PancakeSwap updates the roadmap, signaling future developments.

15.03.2022 - $5.72: A local bottom.

05.04.2022 - $9.90: A local top, but boy oh boy what Terra is about to do to the entire market.

20.06.2022 - $3.00: Hey, at least it is not 0.

01.04.2023 – $3.50: Continued price decrease amidst broader market downturns and reduced DeFi activity.

20.10.2023 - $1.06: Post apocalyptic low resembling near launch era prices. Do or die is real.

13.05.2025 - $2.45: An opportunity for the clever or a trap for the fool? Only time will tell.

Hopium:

Cake have not seen a god candle or a price chart vertical pump since 2021 despite being constantly innovative and active while other project have seen parabolic price growth with some of them having created very little. If a significant alt season returns, let alone a defi summer CAKE might even hit ATH.

Some arbitrary final notes:

Regarding Binance immediate listing of cake. This could imply that Binance knows more about the developers than the general public. However as a founder of a BSC project which at least at some point was highly endorsed by Binance told me "I don't know why Binance love us", it could be that Binance were betting on them even without knowing their identities but if I had to make a bet, they do know who they are and have examined them probably prior to project launch (if not completely create them under the table themselves). BSC, received a lot criticism from the crypto community over the year, a lot about centralization. However not only the network continued to prosper, so did the native token BNB and the parent company Binance. This comes to show that there's room for in the spectrum between complete decentralization to complete centralization for projects to build. On a more broad scale there is room for both fiat and bitcoin to co-exist including everything in-between and at the sides.

I wrote all of this because I enjoy it. But I still hope at least one person who isn't me would read it all. If enough people enjoy this type of content I might post here more often. And opinions are highly appreciated and welcomed!

My past loses on CAKE didn't prevent it from remaining one of my favorite projects. And I hold respect to the team being one of the strongest developers in the field. Let them cook.

Have a good life.