Proposal for Kitchen-Discretionary CAKE Emissions (PancakeSwap)

Proposal for Kitchen-Discretionary CAKE Emissions

After receiving feedback from the community, the Kitchen proposes to earmark up to 0.67% of all CAKE emissions going to veCAKE gauges as Kitchen-discretionary emissions.

This will allow the Kitchen to flexibly set up ad-hoc Farms for trending token pairs and capture crucial TVL and volume for PancakeSwap, thereby increasing CAKE burn for the community.

Rationale

With the launch of our veCAKE system, Farms are adjusted every 14 days based on the veCAKE vote allocation in the previous epoch. This makes it difficult for the Kitchen to launch ad-hoc Farms in a timely manner for trending projects, even if we were to use our Kitchen admin votes.

We also propose launching ad-hoc Farms this way instead of redirecting emissions from our ‘Multichain Warchest’ as the latter is a tedious operational process, will further increase CAKE supply, and takes ~3-4 days to fully take effect due to our smart contract design.

We have launched ad-hoc Farms in the past successfully. Examples include Binance Launchpool projects, tokens with trending narratives (e.g. BRC-20 and memecoins), etc. Some of these pairs were able to capture millions of trading volumes on their first few days of launch.

The CAKE burned from the trading volume generated by such pairs usually heavily outweigh the CAKE emissions distributed to the Farms. This not only helps with CAKE’s deflationary momentum, but also increases PancakeSwap’s competitiveness as a premier trading venue.

Discretionary CAKE Emission Details

Currently, there is ~0.996 CAKE/block channeled towards veCAKE gauges. We propose to earmark up to 0.67% of it as Kitchen-discretionary emissions, which is ~0.00667 CAKE/block. We will keep it at 0.67% even if the CAKE emission rate towards veCAKE gauges changes.

For clarity, the 0.67% will be deemed as an upper limit, and we don’t foresee hitting the cap anytime soon. This upper limit should be able to sustain ~3 ad-hoc Farms at any given time - this is not our target, but rather a buffer in case there are many trending tokens we wish to capture volumes for.

If there are no ad-hoc Farms, the 0.67% veCAKE emission will continue to go towards all other Farms. Only when an ad-hoc Farm is established will (a portion of) the discretionary emissions be used.

Farms that are set up using these Kitchen-discretionary emissions will be short-term in nature, to capture TVL and volume when the community interest in those tokens is at its peak. If the tokens do not perform well, we will be quick to stop the Farms.

Regardless, we will gradually tune down CAKE emission to these Farms to let organic TVL and volumes take over, or transition towards the project team incentivizing liquidity on their own via our veCAKE system.

Implementation

Once this vote proposal passes, the Kitchen will have the discretion to set up and stop ad-hoc Farms using the earmarked CAKE emissions detailed in this proposal. We will include these adjustments and their performance in our fortnightly Epoch Reports on the PancakeSwap Forum.