Bake (formerly Cake DeFi) review and usage tips
Sign up with Bake via the referral link or referral code: 675992.
Note: current Bake referral campaign only benefits the referrer, but if you sign up and perform a recurring buy, you will be eligible for the lucky draw at the ‘Hot Summer Giveaway’ campaign. Over $200,000 worth of prizes will be given out and the top prize is a Tesla Model S car!
Table of Contents
Company
The most transparent way to put your cryptocurrencies to work
Bake (formerly Cake DeFi) was founded in the 2019 by Dr. Julian Hosp and U-Zyn Chua. It is a Singapore-based blockchain and fintech company that empowers users to be in control of their finances by creating cash flow and harnessing the potentials of Decentralized Finance. It enables users to earn and generate rewards and returns on their cryptocurrency holdings.
In June 2023, Cake Group celebrated it’s 4th birthday. Check out the Youtube video about their journey so far and future plans.
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Business Units
Cake Group consists of four verticals across retail, institutional, R&D and venture capital.
Bake
Bake (Bake.io) is the retail arm of Cake Group.
Levain
Levain is Cake Group’s institutional wing.
Birthday Research (BDR)
Birthday Research (BDR) is the Blockchain Research and Development (R&D) wing of Cake Group. It was named ‘Birthday Research’ as a nod to the ‘Birthday Problem’.
Birthday Research will largely focus on two functions that align 100% with the group’s goals: open source software contribution and new research-heavy product design and incubation.
What is the Birthday Problem?
In probability theory, the birthday problem asks for the probability that, in a set of n randomly chosen people, at least two will share a birthday. The birthday paradox is that, counterintuitively, the probability of a shared birthday exceeds 50% in a group of only 23 people.
See more on Wikipedia
Whisk
Launched in Q1 2022, the venture capital arm of Cake Group invests in tech startups at all stages of development, with a preference towards Web3, Esports/Gaming and FinTech.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
- Cake DeFi will partner SportCares to enable vulnerable individuals to experience and reap the benefits of sport by instilling confidence and elevating one’s outlook on life [2022]
Key metrics
- Cake DeFi team has 140+ active team members [Aug 2022]
- Over half of them are based in Singapore
- 150,000+ customers [Jun 2021]
- $230 mil USD were paid to customers as rewards in 2021
Notable Developments
- Cake’s enterprise department has renamed to Levain to empower the rise of DeFi for institutions [Apr 2023]
- Over 2 million $DFI were frozen up for 5-10 years during Cake DeFi’s 3rd-Anniversary Freezer Promo [Jun 2022]
- Cake DeFi launches $100m venture unit [Mar 2022]
- Cake DeFi Ventures will invest in gaming, Web3 and financial technology developers.
- first investment is a US-based media startup, The Edge Of Company, Inc.
- DeFiChain DEX Integration [Oct 2021]
- integrated the DeFiChain Decentralized Exchange directly on Cake DeFi, which now processes swap transactions from other cryptocurrencies into DFI.
- update reduced swap fees by almost 90%
Presence in Singapore
- Cake Group is currently headquartered in Singapore.
- Entity: Cake Pte Ltd (UEN: 201918368M)
Bake is a member of the Singapore FinTech Association’s Web 3.0 subcommittee and an industry member of ACCESS’ Virtual Asset Payments Group.
Office Grand Opening in November 2022:
Regulatory Compliance
Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)
Currently exempted from holding a licence under the transitional arrangements in the Payment Services (PS) Act.
Other regions
Since June 2022, Bake is authorized to conduct services for exchanging cryptocurrency, and providing and administering cryptocurrency custodial wallets in Lithuania. This will facilitate Cake’s cryptocurrency registration and authorization in other EEA member states and for future conversion into an EU-wide cryptocurrency authorization when the EU Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA) Regulations become effective.
Travel Rule
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) incorporated the Financial Action Task Force Value Transfer Requirements (‘Travel Rule’) under the Payment Services Act (Notice PSN02).
To comply with the above mentioned, Bake will need sender or receiver identification details for withdrawals and deposits. Learn more in the FAQ.
Deposits:
- Full legal name of the sender
- Name of source wallet (e.g., MetaMask, Binance, Coinhako, etc.)
- Type of wallet
Withdrawals*:
- Full legal name of beneficiary party (i.e., recipient)
- Name of destination wallet (e.g., MetaMask, Binance, Coinhako, etc.)
- Type of wallet
*Note: Previously-whitelisted withdrawal addresses are not affected.
For external private wallet (e.g. MetaMask, TrustWallet, Ledger), a Satoshi test needs to be performed. During the Satoshi test, Bake will prompt you to send a small value (e.g. $1 USD equivalent) of crypto to your Bake account. Your external wallet address is verified once you have successfully transferred the requested tokens.
Social media
Keep up to date with all of the latest on Bake:
Transparency
Bake regularly provides customers with personalized cash flow reports and full transparency with our blockchain nodes, liquidity mining pools and reward transactions.
Bake has a dedicated micro-site on transparency and publishes transparency reports quarterly.
Proof of reserves
- BTC lending reserves: 3HRPnc4SddsFjrLVTfuTZJ2kQhdyCaHT4G
- ETH, USDC and USDT lending reserves: 0x8b802fa7b71ea532187e432d9b87d24cc904243a
Users are able to access their respective Merkle trees to verify their funds. These Merkle trees can be accessed through the personal hash IDs that Bake generates based on the user IDs.
Bake explains Merkle Tree Proof. Simple enough for a layman like me to understand the underlying concept.
Ecosystem
DFI Coin
Rewards from Bake staking are given out in $DFI coin. The $DFI coin is an integral unit of account in DeFiChain.
I feel that the DeFiChain project has great potential and am staying vested by holding on to my staking rewards.
Borrow
Borrow against your crypto assets at competitive rates
ELITE
Membership plan that let’s users boost rewards up to 2.5X.
Freezer
Freeze (lock up) your allocated funds and get up to 2x the rewards.
Special nodes hosted directly on the DeFiChain blockchain allow for increased rewards. However, these higher rewards only apply for freezing periods of 5 and 10 years, as part of DeFiChain’s emission structure.
Learn & Earn
Launched in Oct 2021, “Learn & Earn” enables users to earn a small amount of cryptocurrencies whilst learning about crypto, blockchain and DeFi, in a simple, easy-to-understand, and engaging way.
Liquidity mining
Deposit your favorite coins into shared liquidity mining pools and mine popular coin pairs for high rewards and minimal fuss.
Staking
Join fully transparent node pools to earn staking yields, without the complexity of running nodes yourself.
Key points of Bake’s staking service:
- Staking rewards are determined by the underlying blockchain protocol
- Full transparency via on-chain data
- Bake does not pool customer assets to satisfy blockchain minimum requirements
- The customer decides when to stake and unstake the coin of their choice
- Strict segregation of funds
Detailed explanation can be found in a blog piece.
DefiChain
Join fully transparent masternode pools to earn staking yields (in DFI) in real-time, without the complexity of running nodes yourself.
ETH staking
Earn industry leading annual percentage yields (APY) through auto-compounding with Singapore-based nodes
Solana Staking
By using our Solana Staking service, you can not only earn consistent and competitive returns but also unstake anytime. Since all funds are on chain, you will be able to check node addresses, node statuses and other valuable information and verify yourself.
In May 2023, Bake added Solana (SOL) staking to its platform.
YieldVault
YieldVault launched in March 2023 and is only available in the mobile app at launch time. YieldVault generates yields directly on the DeFiChain, which can be tracked and verified on Bake’s Transparency Page.
Rewards are paid out in-kind, meaning if you allocate Bitcoin, you’ll receive your rewards in Bitcoin.
Another important feature of YieldVault is that there is no lock-in period. Users are free to withdraw funds from YieldVault at any time.
✔️ Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Asset segregation
Bake practices clear asset segregation whereby customers’ assets are kept separate from Bake’s operating accounts. These safeguards ensure that Bake cannot and will not misappropriate any user assets by utilizing them for the company’s own purposes.
As such, if Bake were to become insolvent, creditors (if any) would have no claim over users’ assets.
Source: DO YOU REALLY OWN YOUR CRYPTOS? Why Asset Custody & Segregation Should Matter To You
12-hourly payouts
Bake pays out rewards every 12 hours.
No minimum amount required to stake
You can stake even fractions of a cryptocurrency.
Social login
As of August 2022, you can conveniently sign up and login with your Apple, Facebook, or Google account.
❌ Drawbacks
Deposit fee for some cryptocurrencies
Effective 15 August 2023, Bake implemented a 0.25% fee on deposits from this list of dCrypto.
Expensive to create deposit address for some cryptocurrencies
Creating deposit addresses on the Ethereum network are charged. For example:
- DFI
- ETH
- USDC
- USDT
- The fee is only charged once. The same Ethereum wallet address can be used to transfer USDC, USDT, ETH, DFI … over the Ethereum network.
- To avoid this fee, use the ‘DeFiChain’ transfer network to deposit assets of these cryptocurrencies where possible.
- The fee is adjusted periodically according to market conditions. Last I checked in August 2022, it was US$10 (pretty reasonable), and will be reimbursed back to the client for deposits above US$1000.
Roadblocks when off-ramping from Bake
Expensive to withdraw USDC and USDT on Ethereum via ERC20
Withdrawal fees for USDC and USDT via ERC20 is can be very expensive. A workaround is to swap to DFI and withdraw to a platform that supports DFI.
- The fee is adjusted periodically according to market conditions. In late March 2022, it was $16.
Limited options to off-ramp DeFiChain (DFI) coin
Within the Bake platform, DFI can only be swapped into DUSD or Decentralised Assets dTokens (e.g. dTSLA, dBABA). However, as of February 2022, such tokens are not listed anywhere else apart from the DeFiChain Decentralised Exchange (DEX).
The workaround to resolve this is to:
- withdraw DFI to a DeFiChain wallet that supports the DeFiChain DEX.
- use the DeFIChain DEX to swap into DFI into a suitable wrapped token for off-ramping. Examples include dBTC, dETH, dBCH, dDOGE, dLTC, dUSDC, dUSDT etc
- send the wrapped tokens (e.g. dBTC) back to Bake for unwrapping.
- withdraw from Bake to centralised exchanges to off-ramp to fiat or stablecoins.
The above approach would be complex for a novice investor not familiar with the DeFi space to execute, and would involve fees and charges.
A simpler approach is to withdraw DFI to a centralised exchange to off-ramp to fiat or stablecoins. However, as of February 2022, only a small handful of centralised exchanges support the DFI coin. KuCoin is one of the few major platforms that lists the DFI coin.
Usage Notes and Tips
Getting tax report from mobile app
You can send a request for a tax report to be sent to your email via the Bake mobile app.
Android app instructions:
- Go the the “Activity” tab
- Select “All transactions” from the top portion of the screen.
- In the “Transactions” view, tap on the download icon on the top right corner of the screen to bring up the tax report request screen.
- Select the data and export format desired, then tap “Export” to have the report sent to your email.
Manual instructions required to start earning
As Bake has a few options to earn from your crypto assets, you will need to manually select how to allocate your assets after transferring them into Bake.
If you forget to do so, then the assets are just lying in the Bake account and not earning for you.
Purchasing cryptocurrency directly on Bake is expensive
Bake is not an exchange but it offers options to purchase crypto assets (BTC/ETH) with fiat currency via credit/debit cards.
How it works: Purchases will be processed by Bake’s trusted partners (Transak or BANXA), and the crypto will automatically be deposited in the user’s account on Bake. You would need to have an account with these partners as well, and complete their KYC processes.
Anecdotes on the internet mention this approach is prohibitively expensive due to gateway fees, conversion fees and spreads. It would be wiser to purchase the crypto assets on a crypto exchange and transfer in.