Over the past year, PancakeSwap has significantly revamped its tokenomics, emissions, and growth strategy. Starting from improving CAKE Tokenomics v2.5 to most recently launching the veCAKE Gauges System, CAKE is in a position to pursue further growth across all deployments.
Now that CAKE has achieved consistent deflation for several months and is focusing on accelerating our journey to ultrasound CAKE, this proposal aims to reduce the CAKE token’s total supply to a maximum cap of 450M CAKE. With a current circulating supply of 388M CAKE, the Kitchen believes this new and lower cap will be sufficient to gain market share across all chains and sustain the veCAKE model.
This Discourse post is a forum for discussing this proposal prior to publishing it for voting. Please chime in and comment below with any suggestions!
There are several strong reasons to implement this adjustment:
Certainty for the community on future CAKE token supply: when PancakeSwap launched in 2021, to ensure sufficient incentives to bootstrap the ecosystem. After almost 3 years in development, we now have more accurate estimations of incentives required to achieve our growth targets.
Accelerate the journey to ultrasound CAKE: total supply is an important metric when understanding the impact of token burns and future emissions. Lowering this number is a critical step to achieve ultrasound CAKE and to send a clear signal of PancakeSwap’s pivot away from a hyperinflationary tokenomics model.
Ensure sufficient flexibility for growth: 450M CAKE is a reasonable new cap to implement in order to ensure sufficient supply for future growth (e.g., gaining market share on Ethereum, Ethereum L2s, and new initiatives like position managers)
Adjustment Details:
With the above in mind, we propose the following adjustments to CAKE total supply:
Current Total Supply: 750,000,000 CAKE
Future Total Supply: 450,000,000 CAKE
CAKE Total Supply Decrease: -300,000,000 CAKE
Implementation steps: Decrease the max cap on token supply accordingly
Pleases use bnb model where the total supply decreases over the time with burns. Use distributed cake (lower the rewards) for new chain instead of emiting another 65M. Let’s go only down with circulating and total supply.
Yes - over the past 2 years there have been so many enhancements to the ecosystem and new companies developing competing technologies. Pancake Swap needs innovations to stand out from the crowd and attract institutional and retail investors . Also those of us who bought CAKE before the crash when it was 90% higher would like to see the price jump and recover some of our losses.
It starts looking like you do not know what are you doing. The other projects are not touching their tokenomy that often. It sends bad signal to investors when you do a lot of changes. Calling this deflationary token and having total supply higher than actual will just cause another panic and frustration. Cut it now, set it to 388M and forget the total supply forever. It´s not something you want to update every year imo. Decrease rewards if you need more cake just stop minting, this is the only fix to what you did with “lock” as price plummeted and cake became pump and dump token. You lost serious investors and need to get them back… do not mean few whales but thousands of small investors trusting this project and the team. Even it looks as positive cutting supply by 300M I´m really worried what will be next. Affraid locking my tokens because of uncertainty in this project.
Hi Radovan, thanks for your suggestion. Currently, the CAKE token has already been deflationary for ~3 months or so. Therefore, under the current pace, the ~65M remaining CAKE will not be emitted. In fact, for the time being CAKE total supply will continue to fall.
The reason for the 450M cap is mentioned here.
Ensure sufficient flexibility for growth: 450M CAKE is a reasonable new cap to implement in order to ensure sufficient supply for future growth (e.g., gaining market share on Ethereum, Ethereum L2s, and new initiatives like position managers)
PancakeSwap is currently still in the growth phase where the protocol can attract more liquidity and generate higher levels of trading volumes in the coming years. As we continue to grow PancakeSwap, emissions would be instrumental to grow these initiatives at a fast pace relative to other platforms.
Just as a single example, with the introduction of veCAKE, we expect to be working with more protocols, especially the recent grantees of the metagovernance grant, to onboard additional liquidity onto PancakeSwap. Liquidity that is onboarded onto PancakeSwap may require CAKE incentives (either from existing veCAKE emissions, or additional CAKE emissions if there is a lot of demand).
Despite what I wrote above, the Kitchen continues to aim for the growth of PancakeSwap while keeping emissions deflationary, as we have done so in the last 3 months.
hi IGA2023, the tokenomics of CAKE is dynamic because CAKE operates on a buyback-and-burn model on CAKE that is continuously emitted. This means that if CAKE bought and burn is greater than emitted, it is deflationary (and vice versa).
CAKE emissions have been managed down over the past ~8 months, and have fallen below the burn amount for the last 3 months, therefore CAKE has been deflationary. However, the deflationary dynamic above is not fixed in stone. Looking ahead, we believe that the PancakeSwap protocol should retain some flexibility to increase emissions if there are growth opportunities that are worth emitting CAKE tokens to in the long run. If such growth opportunities arise and token emissions are required, the Kitchen will, as always, put up voting proposals and the community will vote and decide on these matters.
The Kitchen’s base scenario is to grow PancakeSwap while staying deflationary, regardless of the 450M proposed cap.
And the 300,000,000 Cake reduce from the max supply will be burn?
