Where finance and media intersect with reality

Search

Pancake swaps

Credit: Chris Yarzab (Flikr creative commons license)

Yes really. In the brave bold world of crypto, pancake swaps are now a thing.

A close collaborator drew my attention to them having recently worked on an associated project. I still don’t really understand them. They’re part of the Defi phenomenon, which I’ve tried to ignore as much as possible because the whole thing hurts my head. But news of compounded pancake sushi swaps is to enticing to ignore.

So far responses to my inquiries about how these things work look and feel like financial parody:

A pancakeswap is a fork of uniswap that got big. When eth was young people bought sushi for staking at high yields. But then the rise in gas fees made staking expensive inside of ethereum ecosystem. Pancakeswap lives in BSC, ie binance. It’s centralised so they control their costs and don’t have to incentivise liquidity providers. So CAKE which at one time was yielding 80-90% was the best coin for stakers. Look at this, me compounding my day’s interest. For my 400 odd cake I have earned 1.7 cake. In about two days. I compound that. It costs me: 41 cents. I’ve compounded sushi swap in ethereum wallets and the gas fee quoted is upwards of $25. So, no point compounding but then if you don’t compound all the time, frictionlessly you don’t ever get the 1000% apy’s. Not really much to it, it’s uniswap-esque yields without high fees. Although, cake was $40 and now is $7 so if I sold today I’d make a loss.

I can’t help wondering how much of this is going to withstand FCA scrutiny?

The Daily Blind Spot newsletter

Latest blog posts

If viewing on a mobile simply tap the QR code

One Response

  1. Financial products that people don’t understand was the source of the last financial crash. However, it isn’t just a phenomena of crypto and regulators aren’t the cure never have been and never will. For the lay person, these (AMM) are a way to swap one crypto for another…not too difficult to understand ….even for a girl…just kidding but if you are going to behave stereotypically then why shouldn’t I make the jibe. Good luck with this yours bitcoin bro

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *