Controlling CAKE supply

Why CAKE has no hard cap

There's currently no hard cap on the supply of CAKE token, making it an inflationary token.

Community members often point to this as a cause for concern, and while the chefs certainly understand the wish for a hard cap, there's a big reason we don't expect to set one in the near future:

CAKE's primary function is to incentivize providing liquidity to the exchange. Without block rewards, there would be much less incentive to provide liquidity (LP fees etc. would remain).

So what are the other ways CAKE's supply is limited, to counter inflation?

How CAKE supply is reduced without a hard cap

The chefs aim to making deflation higher than emission by building deflationary mechanisms into Pancakeswap's products. The goal is for more CAKE to leave circulation than the amount of CAKE that's produced.

Reducing block emissions

By reducing the amount of CAKE made per block, we slow inflation. This has already been done once: The first reduction in block emissions effectively reduced the number of CAKE produced from 40 CAKE per block to 25. But we don't want to do this too frequently, too early, for the same reason we don't want a hard cap: we still need to incentivize people to provide liquidity.

Deflationary mechanisms

Regular token burns (view burn address) are built into many of PancakeSwap's products (like a 10% burn of CAKE spent on lottery tickets), with more on the way. Check the CAKE Tokenomics page for details on present and upcoming deflationary mechanisms.