PancakeSwap Launches On ZkSync Era

PancakeSwap, the leading decentralized exchange on Binance Chain, has launched on zkSync Era, an Ethereum Layer 2 network.

PancakeSwap v3 currently supports swaps and liquidity providing (LP), with yield farming and LP token staking set to come online in the coming weeks. The exchange will also launch Initial Farm Offerings, allowing new projects to bootstrap liquidity from yield farmers.

“By leveraging Layer 2 scaling solutions, PancakeSwap is paving the way for the mass adoption of DeFi,” PancakeSwap said in an announcement.

PancakeSwap’s CAKE token is up 1.5% over the past 24 hours, according to The Defiant Terminal.

PancakeSwap is increasingly positioning itself as a player in Ethereum’s Layer 2 ecosystem.

PancakeSwap emerged as a serious rival to Uniswap with the rise of BNB Chain in early 2021. However, BNB Chain relinquished its longstanding position as the second-ranked smart contract network by total value locked (TVL) during last year’s bear market and was recently overtaken by Arbitrum, the top Layer 2.

PancakeSwap launched its v3 iteration in April, initially deploying the protocol on BNB Chain and Ethereum. PancakeSwap v3 has since launched on three emerging Layer 2s – Polygon zkEVM, Consensys’s Linea, and now zkSync Era. However, BNB Chain accounts for 83% of v3’s TVL, according to DeFi Llama.

PancakeSwap v3 is the fourth-most popular decentralized exchange with $64.4M worth of trades executed on its BNB Chain deployment in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. The PancakeSwap v3 protocol is a fork of Uniswap v3, offering concentrated liquidity features and tiered fees from 0.01% to 1%.

zkSync Courts Blue Chip dApps

Marco Cora, senior VP of business and operations at Matter Labs, the team behind zkSync Era, told The Defiant that securing native deployments from bluechip DeFi protocols is critical to the network’s success.

“DeFi has been one of the cornerstones of zkSync Era’s explosive growth in the short few months since we’ve launched to mainnet,” Cora said. He added that said zkSync Era has recently enjoyed a surge in activity, surpassing the daily transactions on Ethereum three times.

“It has only happened four times in Ethereum’s history that a Layer 2 surpassed the daily transaction count of the Ethereum main network,” Cora said.

Era currently ranks as the top Layer 2 by 30-day transaction count with 25.7M, followed by Arbitrum with 22.6M, behind Ethereum’s 30.8M.

The project recently said it will provide software allowing third-party developers to launch their own L2s leveraging the “ZK Stack.”

Cora said ZK Stack has already received significant interest from “ both Web2 and Web3 native organizations.”

“Despite ZK Stack launching less than a month ago, close to a dozen projects across major Alt L1s, DeFi, gaming, and NFTs are already exploring proof of concepts in stealth,” he said.