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Decentralization might take another hit with a single proposal on PancakeSwap, not with a whimper but with a 25 million CAKE vote.

PancakeSwap's leadership recently pitched "Tokenomics Proposal 3.0" - promising "True Ownership" while planning to strip away veCAKE, the mechanism that gave long-term holders a voice, is on the chopping block.

Behind the scenes, wallet addresses suddenly locked massive amounts of CAKE right before the proposal (just under 50%), potentially becoming the decisive voting bloc that would obliterate the governance system itself.

Projects built on PancakeSwap now watch the floor tremble beneath them — sacrificial lambs in the kitchen’s quest for “simplified governance.”

Projects like Cakepie, having locked roughly 13 million CAKE through their liquid wrapping system, now face extinction as their entire business model could evaporate faster than syrup on a hot griddle.

These wrappers – allow investors to maintain liquidity while still benefiting from long-term staking. Think Convex for Curve, but with pancakes.

A strange paradox unfolds – some projects committed to the protocol's long-term growth through innovation are the first casualties of its "evolution."

When a protocol celebrated for empowering creators suddenly pulls the rug on its most loyal builders, what's left of DeFi's founding promise?

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They say DeFi has a user experience problem. Clunky interfaces, confusing transactions, approvals on approvals—everything wrapped in walls of unexplained data and buttons that may or may not wreck you.

But here’s the truth: the confusion is the point.

DeFi doesn’t suffer from bad UX by accident. It thrives on it. Because the moment users actually understand what they’re signing, how their funds are routed, or what that weird contract interaction really does? Half the dApps would be empty overnight.

It’s not about onboarding anymore. It’s about obfuscation. Every extra step, every vague button, every transaction with a 0x function hash instead of a readable message is doing one thing: keeping users too disoriented to ask the right questions.

How many of us have hit “Confirm” just to make the damn thing go through? How many have connected wallets to front ends we didn’t trust just because everyone else was aping in? In DeFi, speed is the sell, and clarity is a liability. Because clarity kills FOMO. Clarity makes you think.

And that’s bad for business.

Some platforms try to change it. They build better flows, simulate transactions, warn you before you do something stupid. But those are the exception, not the rule. Because for most of the industry, confusion equals compliance. A user that doesn’t understand is a user that won’t question.

Want real UX in DeFi? Start by building with the assumption that users deserve to know exactly what they’re doing. Until then, don’t call it a user experience problem.

Call it what it is: design by deception.

•Our Gitcoin Grant is live until April 16. We exposed the rugs, now we’re building the tools to stop the next ones.

•How a DeFi whale lost $74m when an Ethereum-backed loan hit the wall [Read more]

•Malware Campaign Spreads Fake Wallet Seed Phrases Through Hacked Mailing Lists [Read more]

•Inside North Korea's Favorite Crypto Laundering Tool: THORChain [Read more]

•Hunters International shifts from ransomware to pure data extortion [Read more]

•Hackers Hammer Android and iPhone Users As Bank Account Attacks Surge 258% in One Year [Read more]

One bogus tax update turned into a digital carpet bomb—crippling Ukraine and dragging half the internet down with it. NotPetya wasn’t ransomware, it was a wiper in disguise: a state-backed smash job that torched networks, nuked hard drives, and left global corps bleeding out. No payday, no mercy—just proof that in cyberwar, the collateral damage is everyone.

We provide an anonymous platform for whistleblowers and DeFi detectives to present their information to the community. All authors remain anonymous. 
We are all rekt.