This is the new entry of a series of blog posts i will do, they will target new people on the cryptocurrency community. In this post i will talk about decentralized exchanges and will teach you how to use the one i find easier for new crypto users in the BINANCE Smart Chain ecosystem, Pancakeswap.
What is PancakeSwap?
PancakeSwap is a Binance-powered Decentralized Alternate (DEX), with BEP-20 token swaps as its major performance. Additional, it’s also possible to present liquidity and have interaction in yield farming on this platform. But for today we will only learn the basics, how to trade on this platform.
How to use PancakeSwap?
Go to PancakeSwap and press the "connect" button on the right top corner to connect your wallet.
You will be presented with a variety of wallets to choose from, but we will use the METAMASK wallet that we created here.
Make sure that you are using the Binance Smart Chain network, you will not be able to use this Dex if you are on any other network, gladly PancakeSwap will ask you to change networks.
Allow the site to switch to BSC if you weren't already using it. If all went well, you will be able to see your address in the top right corner of the web page.
As i said before, the site presents you with a lot of options, farming, pooling, etc. But we are were only for the most basic and useful operation, trading. On the menu, on the left side of the website, find and click on "trade", and after if click on "exchange".
Now you will have 3 choices, "Swap", "Liquidity" or "Bridge", because we are doing a new user guide i will keep it simple and will only tell you how to swap your tokens. We will trade BNB for BUSD, to do it select BAT and input the number of BNB that you wish to trade for BUSD. The output is automatically generated based on the exchange rate.
Click the swap button and the trade will be made. Well, not so fast, as you can see in the image above, my slippage tolerance is pretty high, 8%. Lets change it so we get a more stable exchange rate. To do it, simply click the "settings" button and select a lower value, lets go with 1%.
Now that everything is set up, enter the amounts that you wanna trade (i will swap 0.09 BNB for 48.6 BUSD) and click the swap button. You will receive a popup with the trade details, make sure you are happy with the values and click "confirm swap".
Your metamask will popup now, and will ask you for permission to do the trade (similarly to uniswap), simply press confirm and wait a few seconds.
As you can see, the gas fees on this platform are way lowers than on uniswap or any other erc-20 dex!
Congratulations! You made your first transaction using PancakeSwap!
I hope you found this guide useful and that you are now fully able to make trades using PancakeSwap. If you have any doubts fell free to leave them in the comments.
You can expect new blog posts soon, i will make guides explaining some other common crypto things. If you have any topics you would like to see covered, leave me a comment!
