PancakeSwap is a decentralized exchange native to BNB Chain that allows anyone to trade crypto assets and provide liquidity (to earn trading fees).
PancakeSwap is an automated market maker (AMM) like Uniswap that launched in 2020 on BNB Chain. AMMs rely on liquidity pools rather than traditional order books to execute decentralized trades. The liquidity pools are funded by users who deposit two tokens in equal proportion in exchange for a liquidity provider (LP) token that represents their claims to their share of the total pool, plus a portion of trading fees. On PancakeSwap, users can earn additional yield by locking up their LP tokens to farm for the protocol's native CAKE token.
PancakeSwap charges a 0.25% fee on all trades within a liquidity pool. Of this amount, 0.17% is paid to LPs as a reward for providing liquidity, 0.03% goes to its treasury to be used for maintenance and upgrades of the platform, and 0.05% used to buyback and burn CAKE. The last mechanism has the intended effect of constantly putting upward price pressure on the CAKE token.
You can stake CAKE on the platform to farm additional rewards paid in CAKE and other native protocol tokens. The protocol constantly earns 0.05% of all trading fees to be used to buyback and burn CAKE. LPs also earn 0.17% of fees in return for providing liquidity on PancakeSwap.