# PENDLE has fallen for a year—why you still can’t judge it as cheap just by looking at the drop percentage

Data cutoff: 2026-08-11 20:59 (Beijing Time)

If you see Pendle for the first time, you can start by understanding it as a protocol that “separates future yield for trading.”

In typical yield-bearing assets, principal and interest are tied together. Pendle’s product mechanism splits them into two parts: PT represents the principal you can redeem at maturity, and YT represents the yield generated before maturity. Users who want to lock in a fixed return can buy discounted PT, while those who believe future rates or points will rise can buy YT. The core problem the project solves is giving future yield—something that previously couldn’t be priced on its own—a market price.

These types of demands are not small. After stablecoins, staked assets, and real-world assets are tokenized on-chain, users not only care about whether they can earn yield—they also care whether they can lock in returns early, how changes in transaction interest rates affect them, and how they can exit before maturity. Asset issuers also need an entry point for liquidity. The more markets there are and the deeper the capital, the better the trading experience—and that attracts more assets and users as well. This is Pendle’s most important network effect.

Pendle currently has two product lines. V2 handles PT/YT yield trading; Boros extends the product to funding rates, letting users trade the future cost of funds. Protocol revenue mainly comes from trading, conversions, and related market activities. PENDLE is used for incentives, participates in governance in a staked form, and helps support value distribution; sPENDLE links part of V2 revenue to buybacks and distributions to active stakers.

This value-capture mechanism is already running, but “people are using the product” does not necessarily mean the token is cheap right now. In this round, we can still see 88 markets with no maturity yet and active TVL of about $1.10 billion, but over the past 30 days, holder income is only about $602,000. Capital is willing to stay, which indicates there is product demand; income has not expanded in tandem, which suggests the fee efficiency is not yet strong enough to support chasing the price.

Competition can’t be ignored either. Spectra also offers PT/YT and permissionless markets; Napier allows curators to create and operate yield products more freely. A more direct alternative is for issuers of popular assets to build fixed-term or points-based products themselves—keeping users and revenue within their own applications. Pendle’s advantages are liquidity, the number of markets, asset on-ramps, and established trading habits; its weaknesses are that yield “hot spots” have cycles, and the product formulas themselves are not impossible to replicate.

On supply and unlocks, the team and investors’ allocated shares have already completed vesting, and there will be no cliff unlocks concentrated in the future. Newly added supply is a continuous emission of around 2% annualized, entering incentives on a weekly basis. This reduces the risk of suddenly releasing a large amount of tokens on a single day, but it still brings continuous sell pressure. To assess supply pressure, you should look at real emissions and what recipients do, not simply subtract circulating supply from total supply.

So my conclusion is very clear: PENDLE’s fundamentals are more complete than in the past, yet at roughly $1.35 today it has not provided enough of a safety margin. Being bullish on the project and refusing to chase the price can both be true. Going forward, if sPENDLE revenue continues to rise and Boros’s OI and trades expand in sync, I’ll acknowledge that the market is pricing ahead of time reasonably; if TVL remains high while revenue stays sluggish, then the real issue is value-capture efficiency.

Which side do you care about more? A: Liquidity and product leadership translate into revenue; B: Without continuous improvement in revenue, any bounce is not enough to justify a revaluation. After the next cycle’s data is out, I will publicly review and recap my main judgment from this time.

The above is for research purposes only and does not constitute a return promise or personalized investment advice. Crypto assets can be highly volatile—please assess risks independently.