Binance’s BNB Pops 25% After Company Helps to Finance Twitter Acquisition

Binance’s BNB chain, the most-used Ethereum-compatible blockchain, has surged in popularity over the past week, with the value of its eponymous native token gaining almost 25% since Oct. 28.

The increase in value has been a boon to other applications on the chain, most notably PancakeSwap, the leading decentralized exchange. Transaction volumes, revenue and the total value of assets locked in PancakeSwap have also surged in the past week.

Second-Largest Chain

TVL on BNB chain grew 15% to $9B over the past week. Over the same period, TVL in PancakeSwap grew over 12% to more than $3.3B, according to data from Defi Llama. It’s the largest such increase among the top ten decentralized finance protocols – on any chain – tracked by the data provider.

PancakeSwap’s growth is notable as the DEX dominates BNB (formerly Binance Smart Chain), one of the most-used blockchains in the world.

Total transactions on BNB chain dwarf those on Ethereum, according to data from Nansen, although the value of the transactions on Ethereum far exceeds that on BNB.

BNB Chain Slips as No. 1 Ethereum-Compatible Chain: Report

Nansen Reports Daily Transactions Still Top Ethereum

The Defiant

PancakeSwap was the most used app on BNB chain in the second quarter of 2022, according to Nansen. It has only consolidated market share since then and now accounts for one out of every four transactions on the chain as well as 46% of BNB chain’s TVL.

Chef Icy, the pseudonymous head of business development at PancakeSwap, attributed the growth to a surge of interest in Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, which helped finance tech mogul Elon Musk’s recent acquisition of Twitter, as well as increased interest in PancakeSwap itself.

Aptos Expansion

PancakeSwap has had several prominent Initial Farm Offerings recently, and, last week, expanded to its first blockchain beyond BNB — Aptos, the Layer 1 blockchain being developed by former Facebook engineers.

Layer-1 Blockchain Aptos Launches Its Mainnet

Aptos Labs Raised $150M In July

The Defiant

In proposing the expansion, PancakeSwap noted Aptos’ “low transaction costs, high transaction throughput, and fast transaction speeds,” as well as the development teams’ personal ties. Binance, the company that developed BNB chain, is a major investor in Aptos.

Holders of PancakeSwap’s governance token, CAKE, approved the deployment in a vote that ended on Oct. 21. Two wallets, each holding more than 150M CAKE tokens, accounted for more than half the votes cast. PancakeSwap launched on Aptos a week later.

“Due to our collaboration with the Aptos team, Chefs have made very quick progress in deploying our existing features onto Aptos,” the exchange said in a blog post.

While the total value locked in PancakeSwap on Aptos has grown tremendously — more than 4,000% in the past week, according to Defi Llama — the exchange is still only third on that blockchain with just under $10M.

Nevertheless, Icy said Aptos had likely generated interest in the PancakeSwap platform more broadly.

PancakeSwap plans on deepening its integration with Aptos, and intends to launch CAKE natively on the chain before year’s end. CAKE is up 5% in the past month.