Amidst the crypto boom in Q2, PancakeSwap has experienced phenomenal growth, surpassing an incredible $530 billion in trading volume. This surge raises a crucial question: Is PancakeSwap's "Infinity" upgrade the key to its growing dominance in the decentralized exchange (DEX) landscape? ThrowingToken.com explores the secrets behind PancakeSwap’s roaring success. It shines a spotlight on some of its most unique features and advantages, showing how they stack up against the competition, including Uniswap.
The Infinity Upgrade: A Game Changer
Infinity upgrade First announced on June 6, PancakeSwap’s “Infinity” upgrade introduces a robust set of features aimed at bolstering efficiency, flexibility and user experience. These improvements are more than just cosmetic improvements. They foreshadow a major change for how DEXes operate and have the potential to change the DeFi ecosystem as a whole.
The biggest internal change perhaps is enabling native gas tokens to exist directly in liquidity pools. Today, users are able to spend or invest without having to wrap and unwrap tokens such as BNB or ETH. This simplification saves a step and gas fees as well. Not only are AMMs ubiquitous, but new liquidity pool types like LBAMM (Liquidity Bin AMM) and CLAMM (Concentrated Liquidity AMM) are now available. These innovations free liquidity providers to tailor their strategies to prevailing market conditions and to earn the highest returns possible. Additionally, PancakeSwap has introduced customizable fee structures, allowing users to tailor their trading costs more effectively.
Aside from the new user experience, the technical architecture has changed with the new Singleton Contract technical architecture, grouping all liquidity pools below one smart contract. This slashes costs of the deployment dramatically, saving up to 99%. To further save users money, PancakeSwap uses the ERC-6909 standard to reduce double token transfers.
Hooks: Unleashing Customization and Automation
At the core of the Infinity upgrade is the idea of “Hooks.” Hooks provide a powerful and extensible way for developers to attach custom logic to different stages of the LP-ing and swapping lifecycle. This creates entirely new levels of automation and customization, making PancakeSwap much more versatile than other, less flexible DEX models.
Hooks allow for automated dashboard-side logic to further customize user experience, optimizing system operations such as fee stacking and reward allocation. Users who hold a high enough amount of CAKE tokens receive a 50% reduction in pool fees. This incentive motivates them to supply liquidity and remain committed to the protocol. Hooks can be used to modify liquidity, such as adding or removing it, at different points in the trading process:
- Before initializing a liquidity pool
- After initializing a liquidity pool
- Before modifying liquidity
- After modifying liquidity
- Before swapping
- After swapping
This control and flexibility gives developers the creative freedom to build DeFi applications that you can use directly on PancakeSwap.
PancakeSwap vs. Uniswap: A Head-to-Head Comparison
PancakeSwap’s recent performance metrics tell an impressive story about its burgeoning power. In March 2025, its weekly trading volume jumped to an astounding $14.89 billion. This staggering number surpassed Uniswap’s $8.29 billion to illustrate a staggering percentage growth rate of 60.72%! As of March 26, 2025, PancakeSwap's 24-hour trading volume stood at $254 million, significantly higher than Uniswap's $132 million. Currently, as of September 2021, PancakeSwap has a user base of more than 2.8 million.
While both platforms rank among the leading DEXs, PancakeSwap is currently setting itself apart with its recent Infinity upgrade. This improvement increases the gas mileage and allows for more customization flexibility. With the 50% reduction in gas fees, trading looks much more attractive to users. This gain has been made possible by engineering advances such as native gas token support and the Singleton Contract architecture. Meanwhile, at the time of this writing, PancakeSwap’s daily fees are $61,700 versus Uniswap’s daily fees of $13,200.
Long-Term Impact and the Future of DEXs
As DeFi’s most popular DEX, the Infinity upgrade ensures PancakeSwap stays one step ahead to keep building and innovating. By reducing trading costs, increasing flexibility, and improving user experience, PancakeSwap is well-equipped to attract more users and maintain its competitive edge in the rapidly evolving DeFi ecosystem.
PancakeSwap’s Hooks system has been wildly successful. This could lead to other DEXs following suit, paving the way for a new wave of tailored and programmable DeFi applications. ThrowingToken.com We’re certain that the next generation of DEXs will be faster, more powerful, and allow users to do much more with their tokens. PancakeSwap’s recent Infinity upgrade is an important demonstration of how that vision could work in practice.
