Proposal Summary:

The purpose of this proposal is to enact a drastic and effective change to PancakeSwap’s current operational model, to effectively combat the current crisis caused due to the Locked Staking pool, High Inflation and degradation of community trust and confidence.

PancakeSwap is currently facing the detrimental effects of its 1 year locked staking anniversary, with millions of tokens flooding the market and user sentiment at all time lows, we can expect that the largest exodus of PancakeSwap users is currently underway.

With this proposal comes a huge responsibility from the Chefs and community to consider the implications of such a change and decide if it is in fact the best path forward.

Identified issues:

In response to the current crisis, we have identified key failures that play a critical role in the degradation of the platform.

1. Locked Pool

The Locked Staking pool, unfortunately, has caused more damage to our platform in a matter of hours than any other feature PancakeSwap has to offer. Since the inception of this pool, droves of investors have decided to stake elsewhere, only those who believed that the pool's effects would be sufficiently mitigated after 1 year stayed and locked. This is not the case.

Overall, the PancakeSwap locked staking pool's failure to provide sufficient incentives, combined with the CAKE inflation and amassing of rewards, has caused a significant sell-off and loss of confidence in the platform. The negative impact on CAKE price underscores the importance of designing incentives that encourage long-term holding.

2. Long Term utilities

The current state of the CAKE utility tokens are benign to say the least, with vCake only being effective in team votes, community sentiment is at an all time low when asked if their voices and proposals are heard. iCake itself has also shown little to no action all year, with any IFO available being oversold and the benefits of holding having no serious advantageous impact to the staking investors. bCake, out of all 3 has the most potential, however since the release of v3 trading, it has become defunct. For these reasons alone, no long term investor has any hype or hope for these utilities and will not sway anyone to relock their tokens.

3. High Inflation

Although the Chef’s have made an active effort to bring down the CAKE emissions with each passing vote, the inflation rate of our native token is still at an astounding rate. This constantly devalues each coin at a base level when contributing selling demand outweighs those that are buying.

Proposals:

All-In-One Staking

In order to combat the barrier to entry and the damaging end of year price impacts, we recommend the immediate retirement of the Locked Pool, replacing it with a flexible All-In-One staking pool.

How Does it work?

The new All-In-One staking pool will be the core staking product for PancakeSwap, sharing its traits with the proven and successful BNB Vault.

It will be a flexible pool, with the CAKE portion of the rewards auto-compounding. Other rewards sources do not compound and must be claimed.

The pool will derive its rewards from the following sources:

• Minted CAKE (# / block decided by vote)
• Syrup Pool tokens ( By creating a new utility token ‘sCake’ see below)
• Platform Revenue ( Trading fees, Syrup pool and IFO listing fees, Lending fees?)
• bCake Trading fees ( As part of changes to bCake utility see below)
• vCake bribe fees ( As part of changes to vCake utility see below)

How will this benefit the platform?

By removing the current locked pool, and introducing the All-In-One pool in its place, the rewards for investors would come from multiple sources, not solely CAKE emissions.

We do not recommend a direct higher APR for longer term investors, rather a fair and distributed APR to all investors new and old. This will entice new users to the platform who do not wish the gamble on locking their funds for a year to receive a competitive APR.

This change will provide an attractive, diverse and highly flexible staking solution for ALL investors looking to come into the PancakeSwap protocol, cultivating a return to confidence and trust in the platform. Furthermore, by including platform revenue and utility from traders as sources of rewards, the new flexible staking pool would incentivize investors to hold their CAKE tokens and participate in the growth of the platform's ecosystem, rather than just staking and receiving rewards. This would likely contribute to a healthier and more sustainable PancakeSwap in the long run.

Changes to longterm utilities

Although we do not recommend a directly higher APR for those users who wish to hold longer, we do recommend that there be changes to the long term utilities that make holding on to CAKE worth it from an investment standpoint, promoting users to freely hold, not forcing them into locking away funds to an uncertain future.

We propose that the current multiplied utilities start at a base rate multiplier, and multiply ONLY as the holder remains in the pool. Any withdrawal of CAKE from the pool will reset their multiplier back to base rate.

Changes to bCake:

We believe that bCake is an underutilized asset that can be employed correctly to earn extra revenue for stakers.

Our proposal suggests that any staker may opt to dedicate their bCake to a pool in which farmers who do not participate or have any bCake may bid or elect to use that bCake to multiply their farming earnings. In return the pool receives a % of the boosted earnings which is split amongst the contributors.

Changes to vCake:

We believe that with reform to the voting system, vCake can be a desired asset not only for the staker themselves, but third parties who wish to influence the governance of the protocol.

Our proposal suggests that any staker may opt to dedicate their vCake to a pool in which 3rd Parties may bid to use vCake for governance voting. Bids / Bribes earnt from this will be distributed amongst the vCake contributors.

Introducing sCake:

As part of an effort to incorporate multiple revenue streams into the All-In-One pool, we propose a new utility token dubbed ‘sCake’. This token's role is to act as principal for interacting with the other syrup pool offerings and automatically earn the user tokens from that pool.

sCake will not have a multiplier in the sense of the others, instead it will multiply only by the amount of other syrup pools that are available. I.e if 2 syrup pools are available, then the user will have 2x the base amount of sCake, an allotment of 1x for each pool. As most Syrup pools have a token cap this multiplier would largely be defunct, however it acts as a functional utility to bring in extra revenue to the All-In-One staking pool.

Gradual reduction of inflation:

With the proposed changes to the staking pool, we believe that it sets in place a framework for gradual emission reductions as the platform gains hype from this new innovation.

As the other sources continue to grow, we can afford to reduce emissions to substitute and hold a somewhat steady APR. This is a great opportunity to offer an attractive model whilst working towards ultrasound CAKE.

Conclusion TLDR

The proposal aims to introduce changes to PancakeSwap's operational model to combat the current crisis caused by the Locked Staking pool, high inflation, and degradation of community trust. The proposal identifies the key issues that have played a critical role in the degradation of the platform, including the failure of the Locked Pool to provide sufficient incentives, benign long-term utilities, and high inflation. The proposal suggests replacing the Locked Pool with a flexible All-In-One staking pool that will be the core staking product for PancakeSwap. The pool will derive its rewards from multiple sources, including minted CAKE, syrup pool tokens, platform revenue, and trading fees. Additionally, changes to the long-term utilities are proposed to make holding on to CAKE worth it from an investment standpoint.