PancakeSwap charges 0.25% per swap on BNB Chain, where gas runs $0.05 to $0.30, cheap enough that small trades are not eaten by fees the way they are on Ethereum. The same permissionless listing that keeps fees low lets anyone open a pool in minutes, and we read the exploits that targeted malicious tokens.
We swapped BNB for a small-cap token, checked what actually landed against the quoted price, then went looking for the exploits that have hit PancakeSwap's pools rather than take the audit badges on faith. PancakeSwap markets itself as the cheap, fast alternative to Ethereum-based DEXs, and BNB Chain's low gas backs that claim up directly, which made the trade-off worth pricing out in detail rather than assuming.
A $20 trade is not a rounding error here
PancakeSwap's V2 pools charge a flat 0.25% swap fee, split 0.17% to liquidity providers, 0.03% to the treasury and 0.05% burned, and BNB Chain gas typically runs $0.05 to $0.30 per transaction. That combination is the entire reason small BNB Chain trades stay practical in a way they rarely are on Ethereum mainnet, where gas alone can exceed a $20 position's fee budget. V3 pools complicate the picture with four fee tiers, 0.01%, 0.05%, 0.25% and 1%, so the router's choice of pool matters as much as the headline percentage.
The scale is real, and so is the market share
DefiLlama puts PancakeSwap's total value locked at roughly $2.29 billion, and the exchange holds an estimated 83% share of BNB Chain DEX volume as of 2025, the kind of dominance that comes from being the default rather than one option among several. CoinMarketCap lists CAKE's market cap near $810 million with a 330 million circulating supply against a 400 million cap, figures that moved after Tokenomics 3.0 cut daily emissions from roughly 40,000 CAKE to 22,500 in 2025 and pushed more of the fee revenue toward burns.
