First published 30 September 2020, the month the exchange opened. Expanded in October 2026 for the supply cap, which governance has voted down more than once, and so CAKE is not described as BNB. PancakeSwap is an app that pools deposits so people can swap. It launched on what was then called Binance Smart Chain. A trade routes through a pool. The pool’s prices move when the trade lands. That is the design, not a quote from a market maker you can phone. What is Uniswap (UNI)? is the earlier version of this shape, on Ethereum. What is BNB? is the coin that pays the fee on this chain. CAKE is neither of them.
The operators post under kitchen names. There is no public company you can look up the way you can look up an exchange that issued a fee token. The record is the contracts. DeFi is software with rules you cannot call support about.
Emissions, burns, and a cap that moved
CAKE is minted for farms and for other rewards, and it is burned when the app spends a share of fees on a burn. Early on there was no ceiling. In 2022 the project proposed a cap of 750 million. Later votes cut that figure. The project’s own docs, after a vote in January 2026, put the hard cap at 400 million. A cap a vote can lower again is a parameter. The supply that exists is what the contract shows after mints and burns, not a blog from the year the farm was loudest.
A farm receipt is not CAKE. The receipt is your claim on the pool, and it is the thing that earns the CAKE emission. Sending the receipt sends the claim. The emission is new CAKE, paid for being in the pool. It is not interest on a deposit account. The rate moves when the emission moves and when the pool fills up. A screenshot is that block.
For a while, locking CAKE into a receipt called veCAKE was how votes were weighted. That lock was retired in 2025. A page that still says to lock for veCAKE is describing a finished gauge. A vote now is a vote with CAKE, under whatever rules the current contracts use. Read them. A wallet signature is not a handshake.
The app has been deployed on other chains. A pool on another chain is a different set of contracts. CAKE bridged there is a different token. An address on BNB Chain starts with 0x and is not an Ethereum address. The wrong network is still the wrong city. A site that says claim CAKE and asks for a recovery phrase is not the farm. Nothing here is an instruction to swap, farm, or buy CAKE.
