Apeswap (BANANA) is a decentralized exchange (DEX) for BEP-20 tokens on Binance Smart Chain (BSC). Apeswap offers a complete toolkit for DeFi purposes like buying tokens that trade against BANANA, token swaps, providing liquidity, staking, lending and borrowing, IDOs, and margin trading. Apeswap also offers partners the option to list tokens on the exchange and create staking pools and yield farms to incentivize users to trade them.
The decentralized exchange is considered one of the biggest in the Binance ecosystem and has partnerships with important projects like FRAX, LUNR, KAI, and Animoca Brands. Apeswap considers its mission to be providing accessible financial opportunities for the crypto masses through transparency, security, and support. Its vision is to decentralize traditional finance and create a fair economy through a sustainable, community-driven DAO.
## Who Are the Founders of Apeswap?
Apeswap was launched in 2021 and consists of more than 15 team members, which are listed with their bios here. The entire team is pseudonymous and presented behind avatars like Harambe or Donkey Kong. The full co-founder list consists of:
ApeGuru — Expert Full Stack Developer
ApeTastic — Expert Smart Contract Developer
Harambe Nakamoto — Tokenomics, Analytics and Engineering
DK — Business Development and Marketing
Obie Dobo — King of the Community Jungle
However, despite their anonymity, all profiles are fairly detailed and the entire team has been working on the project for almost a year. Therefore, the probability of Apeswap being a rug pull is fairly low.
Apeswap does not list any investors on its site.
## What Makes Apeswap Unique?
Apeswap offers the standard toolkit for DeFi purposes, with its core product being the decentralized exchange, which allows users to swap between more than 150 tokens on BNB and Polygon. Apeswap collects comparably low trading fees of 0.20% on token swaps, of which 0.05% go to its treasury and 0.15% are redistributed to liquidity providers. In Q1 2022, Apeswap plans to release leverage trading.
Another key feature of Apeswap is its yield farms, incentivizing users to provide liquidity through staking APE-LP tokens. Investors looking for a passive investment strategy can use its auto-compounding vaults, where tokens are automatically staked to generate farming profits. There are also Burning Vaults, which use a share of its farming profits to buy back and burn the native BANANA token.
IDOs at Apeswap are called “Initial Ape Offerings” and can be either official IAOs (endorsed and audited by Apeswap) or self-serve IAOs (unvetted projects).
Finally, Apeswap released a set of 1,000 “non-fungible apes” that can be traded at its NFA Auction House. The exchange also plans to create a set of “non-fungible bananas” in cooperation with its partner Liquid Collectibles.
## Related Pages:
Check out Dodo (DODO) — a BSC decentralized exchange.
Check out Uniswap – an Ethereum decentralized exchange.
Learn more about DEXs here.
Get the latest crypto news and latest trading insights with the CoinMarketCap blog.
## How Many Apeswap (BANANA) Coins Are There in Circulation?
Apeswap works with a dual-token model with two primary utility tokens: BANANA and GNANA. BANANA tokens are used to incentivize liquidity providers, and GNANA rewards users with access to governance and exclusive benefits. BANANA has four primary use cases:
* Staking it to earn more BANANA
* Buying GNANA with it
* Lending BANANA on the lending platform for rewards
* Swapping it for other tokens
BANANA is an inflationary token with no cap on its total supply. Currently, 316,800 BANANA are being emitted every day and distributed accordingly:
* Yield Farms (BNB Chain): 39.5%
* BANANA Pool: 22.7%
* Lending Network (Ola): 9.09%
* Yield Farms (Polygon): 9.09%
* Bonds: 9.09%
* Dev Wallet: 6.36%
* Burned: 2.73%
* $GNANA Pool: 1.36%
BANANA is to eventually become a deflationary token. Therefore, Apeswap has implemented several deflationary mechanics:
* Quarterly buyback and burn: 50% of trading fees are used to buy back and burn BANANA
* Weekly burns on Thursdays
* GNANA raised during IDOs are used to buy back and burn BANANA
* Partner projects burning BANANA
* GNANA reflect fees are used to burn BANANA
* 10% of fees collected through Burning Vaults are used for buying stablecoins and leaving them in vaults permanently. Rewards earned from these vaults are used to buy back and burn $BANANA.
## How Is the Apeswap Network Secured?
BANANA is a BEP-20 token on Binance Smart Chain (BSC). Apeswap operates on Binance Smart Chain and Polygon.
BSC is secured using a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. 21 validators are elected every 24 hours to validate transactions and maintain the blockchain’s security. These validators have to stake a certain amount of Binance Coin (BNB) with Binance to be eligible.
Polygon is a layer-two scaling solution of Ethereum.
Apeswap has been audited by DeFi Yield and Certik in 2021 and BSC Gemz in 2022. No critical vulnerabilities were found.
## Where Can You Buy Apeswap (BANANA)?
BANANA is available on Apeswap, Pancakeswap (V2), MEXC, and Bitrue.
If you want to learn more about how to start buying cryptocurrencies, you can read more in our guide.