In April 2025, we passed the CAKE Tokenomics Proposal 3.0, which retired the veCAKE model and reduced CAKE emissions from ~40,000 to ~22,500 per day.
Because of this change, we attained a net burn of ~8.19% of CAKE’s token supply in 2025, reducing it from 380M at the start of the year to ~350M now, maintaining CAKE’s deflationary streak since Sep 2023, with no signs of stopping soon.
Given this, the Kitchen would like to propose reducing CAKE’s max supply from 450M to 400M CAKE. We believe this is sufficient to sustain all future protocol growth.
While this still leaves ~50M CAKE between the current circulating supply (~350M) and the new max supply (400M), this is a buffer that we don’t foresee ourselves needing to use, though if extenuating circumstances require, we may still tap on.
That said, we have been steadily growing our Ecosystem Growth Fund, which has currently accumulated ~3.5M CAKE tokens. This can and will be used for the protocol’s growth needs before any additional emission is even considered. Hence, it is unlikely that the protocol will ever revert to an inflationary state.
Adjustment Details:
With the above in mind, we propose the following adjustments to CAKE’s max supply:
Current Max Supply: 450,000,000 CAKE
Future Max Supply: 400,000,000 CAKE
CAKE Max Supply Decrease: -50,000,000 CAKE
Implementation steps: Decrease the max cap on token supply accordingly
Please make sure you understand the impact of long and short term effects of CAKE emissions changes on our tokenomics.
Very good, I agree to reduce the supply. And I think we can suspend the issuance of additional cake for now. If LP providers need incentives, we can consider giving some of the cake that should be burned each week to them
I really like this proposal! Great job by the Kitchen team on continuing to improve the tokenomics – this keeps CAKE one of the most sustainable tokens out there!
I’ve been an outside holder observing the protocol for some time, but I’m looking for clarity on a few points regarding the current proposal:
Emission Rate Calculation: Is the emission rate based on the Total Supply (348M) or the Circulating Supply (334M)? Specifically, when do emissions stop. It is vital to know if emissions will continue indefinitely if burn is always greater than supply or if they are capped once the total supply is reached.
Strategic Suggestion: I believe it may be in the protocol’s best interest to remove emissions entirely. Instead, we could allocate a percentage of the burn to fund incentives and team requirements. This pivot would ensure the protocol is always in a “net burn” state, providing better long-term value for holders.
Today, I discussed this issue with everyone in the discussion group. I think there is some ambiguity about the maximum supply. If the circulation plus the amount of repurchased and destroyed tokens should be less than the maximum supply, then I think adjusting it to 400 million tokens is fine, because the current circulation plus the destroyed amount is already 397 million tokens. If the maximum supply refers to the circulation being less than the maximum supply, then I think adjusting it to 350 million tokens is fine now. The difference here lies in whether the tokens we have repurchased and destroyed through revenue should be counted in the supply. I believe that the issuance of tokens can be stopped, and if any incentives are needed, a portion of revenue can be taken out, rather than continuously issuing more tokens, which can be frightening for those who don’t understand tokens
I 100% agree with the proposal to reduce the CAKE token max supply from 450M to 400M, as it reinforces the deflationary trajectory established since September 2023, provides a prudent buffer for future needs while leveraging the Ecosystem Growth Fund, and ensures long-term tokenomic stability by minimizing emissions and potential inflation risks in both short and long terms.
There are some comments to stop our emissions entirely and rely on a portion of our burns each week to use as LP incentives. I explained in this tweet why having a fixed emission schedule is beneficial to the protocol: https://x.com/ChefMaroon/status/2011442449500262469
Max supply refers to the theoretical maximum that CAKE’s total supply can reach. Tokens that have been bought back and burned do not count towards the max supply - they have been removed completely. As explained in the proposal above, having a buffer between our total supply and max supply gives the protocol some leeway to work with in extenuating circumstances where our buybacks may be less than our emissions. We don’t foresee this happening anytime soon though.
In this case emissions should be based more on a USD value or have some ability to scale down as the price of cake increases. If cake is $20 we would give out 500k a day which is way too much. I want to hold cake long term but would be comforted to know that as cake goes up in value people just don’t dump it back down again.
I think the problem issue with current emission in which it can generate more than 8-9 million cake token/week and the burning is manually by the pancake team. It create a risk for large investor which the team identity also unknown and can possibly go wrong. Although the said current token burn is larger than the emission, there is always some risk that the team keep the emission token in future (manually) therefore cake marketcap is always a lot lower than uniswap although it should near the same or higher. It not the utility problem, marketshare, but the risk it currently have.
If we remove the emission completely or limit issuance token for example 50.000 cake per week on the code level/fork this will greatly enchanced the credibility of cake token rather than reduced the max supply.
The code is immutable and was set at 40 CAKE / block when PCS first started, so when BNB Chain’s block times get shorter, the blocks per day and hence CAKE minted per day inevitably has to correspondingly increase. We burn most of it to keep net mint to ~22.25k / day.
We have been burning CAKE transparently on the blockchain for >5 years now. We hope that this provides a sufficient track record to have faith in the Kitchen’s dealings.
I trust the team but the risk factor is still presence or not 0. I have seen your justification for not ommited the token issuance but for current condition, I think PSC should be fine without it, using your revenue for some treasury is better than relied on token issuance. The DEX competitor uniswap and raydium do not even need new issuance of token every year, pancakeswap with much larger revenue should be able to do the same.
Uniswap just approved an annual growth budget of 20M UNI tokens, which at current price, is $77M per year. Apart from paying for salaries, part of this budget will probably be used for emissions (my guess).
Raydium, while being fully vested in terms of tokenomics, still has a mining reserve and a partnership bucket which they can use to incentivize growth.
Efficiently managing our allocated emission budget is one of the ways we look to out-compete other players.
Great job by the Kitchen team on continuing to improve the tokenomics – this keeps CAKE one of the most sustainable tokens out there! 
