Super Heavyweight DEX Coming to BNB Chain

Let the Battle of the DEXes on BNB Chain begin! The Uniswap community has officially approved a proposal to deploy Uniswap v3 on BNB Chain, setting up a massive showdown with the chain’s longtime dominant Decentralized Exchange (DEX) PancakeSwap as well as other competitors, new and old.

When voting ended at 13:53 UTC Feb. 10, more than 66% of $UNI ballots were cast in favor of the proposal from 0xPlasma Labs.

As is typical for political processes, the sausage-making by the Uniswap DAO wasn’t entirely pretty, as the selection of Wormhole as the cross-chain bridge between Ethereum and BNB Chain goaded major $UNI holder a16z (a backer of competing bridge LayerZero) into casting all of its 15 million UNI tokens against the proposal.

The introduction of outsize influence by a special interest group raised eyebrows and hackles among the decentralization-loving crypto crowd.

But in the end, a16z’s size was not size enough, although its votes accounted for about half of the “Nays” to the proposal.

Uniswap Supremacy

The introduction of Uniswap v3 to BNB Chain is obviously a huge deal. As BSC News noted in a previous story, powered by its greater capital efficiency, the DEX almost instantly rose to a dominant position when it expanded to Polygon, basically wiping out the market share of native protocol Quickswap (like PancakeSwap, based on a fork of an earlier version of Uniswap).

In fact, on all five chains where Uniswap v3 has been deployed -- Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, and Celo -- it is the dominant DEX on that chain in terms of trade volume, according to DefiLlama.

(Most recently, Uniswap v3 took the top spot on Celo in terms of 7-day trading volume, surpassing Ubeswap, which is, yep, based on a fork of Uniswap.)

Battle of the DEXes on BNB Chain

Does Uniswap’s entrance spell trouble for PancakeSwap? Will the chefs prevail, as they’ve been introducing major upgrades to the DEX and expanding to other chains themselves, such as Ethereum and Aptos?

Even if Uniswap v3 is able to provide more-efficient trades to users compared to PancakeSwap, will that matter to users on a blockchain with such low transaction costs that gas fees are mostly an afterthought?

And of course, it wouldn’t be wise to sleep on the cast of up-and-coming challengers, including Trader Joe, Wombat Exchange, Baby Doge Swap, and Thena, or BNB Chain veterans like BiSwap and DODO.

No matter which protocols emerge victorious from the Battle of the DEXes, the heightened competition is a win for DeFi users and BNB Chain itself.

What is Uniswap:

Uniswap was launched in November 2018 and has grown to become the largest decentralized exchange in its category. It was built open-source on the Ethereum blockchain and uses the AMM model to facilitate Ethereum ERC-20 token swaps. Uniswap

Much of the progress made in Ethereum-based DeFi expansion is attributable to Uniswap as it provided the market-making utility for Web3 apps to function in a decentralized environment. The platform consistently records daily trade volumes of over half a billion dollars and has a total volume locked (TVL) of more than $3 billion. The platform has traded over $1 trillion since it launched via over 129 million transactions.

Where to find Uniswap:

Website | Twitter | Discord |

What is PancakeSwap:

PancakeSwap is a Decentralized Exchange (DEX) built on BNB Chain. It offers users various features such as Liquidity Pools, Swapping, Yield Farming, Syrup Pools, Automated Market Maker, Initial Farm Offering (IFO), NFT profile system, and many others.

In addition, the protocol helps users make the most out of their crypto assets by trading, earning through yield farming, and winning via lottery, prediction, and NFT collectibles. With the highest trading volumes in the market, PancakeSwap is the leading DEX on the BNB Chain.

Where to find PancakeSwap:

Website | Twitter | Medium | GitHub