How to do your PancakeSwap (CAKE) taxes with Koinly
Whatever your PancakeSwap transactions, you'll need to figure out if you owe tax on them. Koinly can help. It's this simple:
Sign up to Koinly and choose your country and currency.
Connect the wallets you use to interact with PancakeSwap to Koinly to import all your trades safely and securely
Koinly identifies the cost basis of all your coins and tokens (including BEP-20 tokens), as well as your taxable transactions.
Koinly calculates any capital gains, losses, and income from your taxable transactions.
Koinly generates your crypto tax report - ready to help you file with your tax office, or hand it over to your accountant.
How to import PancakeSwap transactions to Koinly automatically
To import your PancakeSwap transactions, you'll need to connect each wallet you use with PancakeSwap to Koinly. This is easy to do, you just need your public address - and we have steps on how to get your public address for all the most popular wallets on our integration pages.
As PancakeSwap supports a lot of different blockchains, this may mean getting multiple public addresses from each wallet to ensure you're importing your transactions from all blockchains. Here’s an example of how it generally works.
On wallet
Open or log in to your wallet
Select the blockchain you’d like to connect to - for example, BNB Smart Chain or Ethereum
Copy your public address
On Koinly
Sign up or log in to your Koinly account and go to the wallets page
Search for and select the blockchain you’d like to connect to - for example, BNB Smart Chain or Ethereum
Give your wallet a name - for example - Trust Wallet or MetaMask
Paste your public address
Select import
Want to learn how your PancakeSwap transactions are taxed? Find out more in our PancakeSwap tax guide.
What is PancakeSwap?
PancakeSwap is another decentralized exchange (DEX), following in the footsteps of other popular dexes like SushiSwap or UniSwap. Unlike those two examples though - PancakeSwap runs on the Binance Smart Chain and allows investors to trade BEP-20 tokens, as well as earn liquidity pool tokens and PancakeSwap’s native token CAKE.
DeFi investors have flocked to PancakeSwap since its launch in September 2020 thanks to high liquidity and a wide variety of investment opportunities.
How does PancakeSwap work?
PancakeSwap works similarly to any other automated market maker (AMM). So instead of relying on order books, limit/market orders and bid/ask systems, trading on the platform is enabled by automated liquidity pools - maintained by liquidity providers and executed by smart contracts.
Anytime a liquidity provider adds liquidity, they’ll receive liquidity pool tokens representing their share in a given pool(s). In return for providing liquidity, liquidity providers receive a share of the transaction fees related to the pool they’ve contributed to. On PancakeSwap, both makers and takers pay a flat 0.25% transaction fee, 0.17% of which is shared among the liquidity providers. The remaining 0.08% goes to the PancakeSwap treasury - which is used to maintain the platform, pay salaries, fund bounties, and so on.
Whenever someone trades in a pool you’ve provided liquidity to, the majority of their transaction fee will go back into the liquidity pool. These fees increase the value of liquidity pool tokens, so when you redeem them by removing your liquidity - you’ll have more of your cryptocurrency than you first put in. The longer you leave your liquidity in a given pool, the more trading fees you’ll earn.
To access PancakeSwap, you’ll need a Web3 wallet. The most popular options include MetaMask, WalletConnect, and Trust Wallet. Some of these wallets take a little configuration to support the Binance smart chain, but once you’ve done it, you can interact with the PancakeSwap interface using your wallet.
What can you do on PancakeSwap?
PancakeSwap offers all the features any other dex does, as well as some other special ones. You can trade BEP-20 tokens, as well as add liquidity and earn rewards.
You’ll find a huge variety of liquidity pool tokens available depending on the pool you add to. For example, if you added BUSD and BNB to the pool - you’d get a BUSD-BNB liquidity pool tokens in return. This works the same way for every pool. You’ll receive a proportional number of tokens that represent your share in the pool.
You can redeem your liquidity pool tokens to reap the trading fee rewards whenever you want to. But one of the awesome features that came from PancakeSwap V2 was the farming and staking protocols.
PancakeSwap Staking and Yield Farming
You can farm CAKE - PancakeSwap’s governance token - by staking your LP tokens in one of PancakeSwap’s farms. There are a huge amount of options for which liquidity pool tokens to stake, some offering more than 200% APR - see a full list here.
It doesn’t end there either because you can also stake the CAKE you earn in SYRUP pools. Like above, there are a lot of SYRUP pools to pick from - each offering different tokens as a reward, like RACA, APX, FUSE, and many more. You can even stake your CAKE to earn more CAKE. One of the most interesting SYRUP pools though is the IFO CAKE pool.
PancakeSwap IFOs
The IFO CAKE pool lets investors earn credits by staking cake. An IFO is an initial farm offering - in other words, the new projects that launch on PancakeSwap, like SYRUP pools and more. When you stake CAKE in the IFO CAKE pool, you’ll earn IFO credits that give you the ability to get early access to earn from brand new projects.
PancakeSwap Lottery
Another fun feature is the PancakeSwap lottery. You can use CAKE to enter lotteries on the platform and a ticket costs around $5 in CAKE. The lottery pool is funded by a percentage of the PancakeSwap Treasury fund and will increase until someone wins the jackpot. At the time of writing, the jackpot is just over 15,000 CAKE (so around $116,000!)
PancakeSwap NFTs
Finally, PancakeSwap has an NFT marketplace where you can buy and sell NFTs - as well as a fun game where you can win NFTs from the Pancake Bunnies collection. You can win these by completing various tasks and taking part in competitions on the platform. You can then sell these prize NFTs for CAKE or keep them.
