Binance’s venture capital and incubation arm announced it invested in CAKE, the utility and governance token of decentralized exchange (DEX) PancakeSwap.
The undisclosed investment is part of the entity’s “mission to facilitate the next wave of global blockchain adoption by providing technology development, marketing and community support, and enterprise solutions for Web3 transformation,” said Binance Labs.
Launched in September 2020, PancakeSwap is an automated market maker (AMM), allowing users to trade, swap, and stake BEP-20 tokens issued on Binance’s BNB Chain.
According to Binance Labs, PancakeSwap is currently the network’s biggest decentralized app (dApp), with over 400,000 daily active users. In terms of total value locked (TVL) on the platform, DeFi Llama reports that the platform currently boasts $4.82 billion, making it BNB Chain’s most valuable application too.
Boasting $387 million in trading volume over the past 24 hours, PancakeSwap (v2)—the latest iteration of the protocol—is now the third-largest DEX behind Uniswap (v3) and dYdX only, per CoinMarketCap.
“PancakeSwap has been leading the development and mass adoption of BNB Chain. Given that PancakeSwap is the most widely used dApp and the DeFi project with the highest TVL on BNB Chain, we have and will continue to provide strong support for the project,” Bill Qian, head of Binance Labs, said in a statement.
Binance, which operates its own DEX, doesn’t control or operate PancakeSwap, which was built by anonymous developers. It is not immediately clear whether this will change following today’s announcement.
Decrypt reached out to Binance Labs and will update the story accordingly, should we hear back.
Binance, Cake, and PancakeSwap
The price of CAKE rallied to a weekly-high of $4.84 following the announcement, before correcting to $4.66 by press time, which is still up 7.14% over the last day.
With a market capitalization close to $761 million, CAKE is currently the industry’s 66th-largest crypto asset.
Since its launch in 2018, Binance Labs—marketed as “a social impact fund and an initiative to incubate, invest, and empower blockchain and cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, projects, and communities”— has invested in over 100 projects.
Its portfolio includes such major projects as Audius, Axie Infinity, Dune Analytics, Elrond, Polygon, Optimism, The Sandbox, and 1inch, among others.
Last week, Binance Labs announced a new $500 million investment fund dedicated to discovering and supporting “projects and founders with the potential to build and to lead Web3 across DeFi, NFTs, gaming, Metaverse, social, and more.”
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