The insane number of rug pulls and scamcoins with the bizarre names in recent months is a direct result of the Binance Smart Chain and DEX’s like PancakeSwap making it easier than ever for these scammers to operate

I saw a post earlier regarding the state of r/CryptoMoonshots and the recent surge in “FairElonDogeMoon” type Ponzi/rugpull coins and thought I would share my two cents regarding what’s behind it.

PancakeSwap is a BSC Decentralised Exchange (DEX), for an easy comparison it’s the BSCs equivalent to Uniswap for Eth. It was created in September last year but has really rocketed in popularity this year and has started to see an insane amount of volume and continues to grow everyday.

So, why has it become so popular? Minuscule gas fees are without doubt the main reason behind its surging popularity. Everyone knows about the issue with Eth gas fees on Uniswap, the eye-wateringly high fees really makes purchasing small amounts and day-trading off limits, people are only really buying to hold.

Who doesn’t love lower fees, right? Surely this is brilliant. While that makes PancakeSwap sound great, what has actually happened has resulted in the low cap crypto market becoming an absolute Scammers Paradise. Because Eth gas fees on Uniswap are so high, people are generally only investing in coins with real life use cases which they genuinely believe in. Exchanging shitcoins on there is practically unheard of because it’s not worth anyone’s while.

PancakeSwap however has led to the birth of a new breed of degenerate, this breed of degenerate will throw a couple of hundred dollars at every coin they see which has a rocket emoji next to it. These coins all have the maximum Quadrillion supply to make it appear to dummies that they’re receiving an enormous amount of coins who will in turn think to themselves “if this reaches even £0.01 I’ll become a multi-millionaire, easy!”. This plays perfectly onto the hands of the Scamming Rugpull devs.

Scammers absolutely adore this place; no real life use case necessary, no explanations required for what new things it brings to the market, simply throw in a few of the buzzwords they all love like “Deflationary” “Community-Driven” “Charity” among several others and boom, you’re in business. For just a couple of hundred dollars they can create their own scam coin within minutes, shill it with bots on reddit and rugpull with thousands, often even millions when they’ve done it really well! (Laika, Cheese and Forestry all examples of devs rugpulling in the millions in the last few days among many others)

This is directly as a result of the ease of submitting your own coin/token to PancakeSwap and the fee-less nature meaning degenerates will ape into absolutely anything. These devs know people aren’t going to want to risk their money on an exchange where they have to pay half on gas fees which makes PancakeSwap and other BSC DEX’s the perfect breeding ground for them to run their scams

If you take a look at CryptoMoonshots today compared to even 3 months ago, it’s night and day. None of these coins with ridiculous names existed, there were far fewer bots, you’d find genuine discussion between real people in the comments and you’d find coins with genuine use cases (personally I discovered GRT and TRAC from there).

You won’t find a Uniswap or any Eth based DEX in sight these days on CryptoMoonshots, practically every coin on there leads directly to a PancakeSwap listing. You’ll notice today that virtually all the front page posts on there have hundreds of awards in the first two minutes and the comments on the threads are all your generic, one liner typical comments from accounts with 4 comments in 4 years.

I was initially really excited at the prospect of a DEX trading genuine low market cap coins practically fee-less and moving away from the crazy high Eth fees. PancakeSwap should have been a brilliant addition to the Crypto market, instead its become an absolute mess.