Pendle

Pendle is a decentralized finance protocol focused on interest rates and yield. Its core mechanism tokenizes yield-bearing assets by splitting them into separate principal (PT) and yield (YT) components, which trade on a purpose-built automated market maker designed for assets subject to time decay. This lets users buy fixed yield with no lock-up period, sell future yield for immediate liquidity, hedge yield exposure, or speculate on future yield levels.

The platform is organized around two products. Pendle V2 covers spot yield trading, fixed-yield earning and leveraged long-yield positions, and includes yield tokenisation, the Pendle AMM (concentrated liquidity, dual fee structure, low impermanent-loss exposure) and sPENDLE staking. Boros, a newer product, is a leveraged interest-rate trading product structurally similar to V2 but aimed at mean-reverting rates such as perpetual funding rates and staking yields, where leverage is needed to make small rate spreads economically meaningful; it also supports off-chain rates. Management has stated Pendle will not offer spot or perpetual contract trading and will remain focused on interest-rate products.

Pendle V2 is deployed across multiple chains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, BNB Chain, Mantle, Sonic, Berachain, HyperEVM, Monad and Plasma. Smart contracts have been audited by firms and individual auditors including ChainSecurity, Spearbit, Dedaub, Ackee, WatchPug, Dingbats, cmichel and lleastwood.

Founding story

Co-founder and CEO TN Lee entered crypto around a decade ago as a founding team member of KyberSwap/Kyber Network, remaining until the end of 2018. He then worked on several crypto and AI product ideas with his current co-founders before deciding to build Pendle in 2020. The idea emerged during DeFi Summer 2020 from a desire to lock in yields as high as 10,000–20,000% APY, with "locking in interest rates" as the core motivation.

Business model

Pendle operates a permissionless on-chain protocol: any issuer can list a market on Pendle, and users trade principal and yield tokens through the protocol's AMM. Protocol fees are generated from yield trading and liquidity provision, and up to 80% of protocol revenue is directed to PENDLE buybacks redistributed to sPENDLE stakers.

Protocol-level fees from its yield-trading AMM (a dual fee structure) with revenue routed to token holders/stakers via buybacks and staking rewards.

Traction

Protocol TVL reportedly exceeded $6B in early 2025 and peaked at approximately $13.5B in September, driven largely by stablecoin markets; earlier growth included daily volume rising from roughly $50,000 to nearly $5M after supporting high-APY assets such as Wonderland's wMEMO. PENDLE had about 158,680 holders and a $3.68B TVL as reported on market data.

Latest developments

In January 2026 Pendle announced it would phase out the vePENDLE vote-escrow token in favor of sPENDLE, a liquid staking derivative that can be withdrawn after a 14-day waiting period or immediately for a 5% fee, with up to 80% of protocol revenue funding PENDLE buybacks redistributed to sPENDLE holders; sPENDLE staking was slated to go live the day of the report, with vePENDLE locks paused on January 29. Boros, the leveraged funding-rate trading product, has also launched. Management identifies real-world assets and Bitcoin yields as key future directions.