Pendle, the world's largest crypto yield exchange, announced an upgrade to its native token economy, launching the new sPENDLE. This update aims to unlock deeper liquidity, diversify revenue streams, and further solidify Pendle's leading position in on-chain yield and interest rates. Combined with recent performance data from Pendle and Boros, this upgrade highlights the platform's long-term strategic goals in decentralized finance and its expansion into related markets.
Record performance and agreement dominance in 2025
In 2025, Pendle achieved significant milestones across several core network and financial metrics, demonstrating its strong usage and continued market share in the revenue trading space:
• Average Total Value Locked (TVL): Approximately $5.7 billion, a 76% year-over-year increase, with a peak TVL of $13.4 billion, reflecting strong liquidity participation in the yield market, ranking alongside leading DeFi protocols such as Uniswap, Aave, and Hyperliquid. • Cumulative Protocol Fees: Approximately $44.6 million, a 134% year-over-year increase, of which approximately $34.9 million was distributed to token holders. • Monthly Notional Trading Volume: Approximately $54 billion (90-day rolling average), with daily trading volumes frequently reaching hundreds of millions of dollars, demonstrating strong market demand for fixed income.
These data indicate that Pendle has become an important platform for tokenized yield and funding rate trading, with its realized fee income and liquidity depth exceeding those of many fixed-income platforms.
Pendle's New Token Upgrade Highlights
The upgraded $PENDLE token brings a simpler and fairer overall solution to the ecosystem:
• Protocol revenue will be used to buy back $PENDLE tokens and distribute them to active sPENDLE holders. • Liquidity model optimization: sPENDLE supports a 14-day no-penalty exit period, or instant redemption with a 5% fee. • sPENDLE will be a composable, fungible token that can be integrated with any dApp, eliminating the need to trade off participation versus liquidity regardless of lock-up period. • Voting mechanism upgrade: The original manual voting will be upgraded to an algorithmic emission model, aiming to reduce PENDLE emissions by 20-30% while improving allocation efficiency.
The vePENDLE lock-up mechanism will be suspended on January 29th. Users who held vePENDLE before then will receive a special multiplier (up to 4x) on their remaining vePENDLE balance based on the remaining lock-up period. Rewards will be distributed based on this virtual vePENDLE balance, allowing vePENDLE holders to earn higher returns during the transition period.
Pendle co-founder and CEO TN Lee stated:
"This upgrade represents a structural improvement in Pendle and Boros's expansion process. Our goal has always been to bring the efficiency and scale of the traditional fixed-income market to DeFi. Through this upgrade, Pendle will become a more robust, sustainable, and institutional-oriented yield infrastructure."
Boros: A New Frontier in On-Chain Interest Rate Trading
Another key catalyst driving the token architecture upgrade is Boros—a groundbreaking on-chain platform that tokenizes perpetual contract funding rates, transforming previously untradeable yield streams into tradable assets. Boros' data demonstrates rapid organic growth and enormous development potential.
Key Metrics: Four months after launch, Boros achieved:
Approximately $6.9 billion in nominal open interest
$91 million OI
$6.8 million in deposits (as of the end of 2025)
• Approximately $301,000 in transaction fees has been generated in emerging markets, initially validating the product-market fit of on-chain interest rate derivatives. • The current open interest in the perpetual contract market is approximately $63 billion. Boros is still in its early stages and is expected to achieve 10x OI penetration. • In addition to mainstream BTC/ETH/BNB/HYPE trading pairs, Boros has launched NVDAUSDC–Hyperliquid, allowing users to trade HIP-3 NVIDIA perpetual contracts at funding rates. Future expansion will include more atypical assets and stock index perpetual contracts, such as S&P 500, NASDAQ, AMZN, and TSLA.
By tapping into a huge, yet underutilized source of revenue in DeFi—funding fee exposure—Boros has further strengthened Pendle’s growth path, making its revenue structure no longer solely reliant on TVL and traditional yield fees.
Strategic Vision: From DeFi Yields to Global Fixed Income Infrastructure
This token upgrade for Pendle aims to support its expansion of DeFi yield layer infrastructure and its integration with centralized and traditional financial markets. Fixed income is one of the largest sectors in the global financial system, and Pendle has built a comprehensive suite of tools—from principal tokens (PT) and yield tokens (YT) to funding rate derivatives—to help users access this market more easily.
In the future, Pendle will continue to expand its ecosystem integration efforts, including leverage strategies, AI applications, PT collateralization, and cross-chain liquidity mechanisms.
About Pendle
Pendle is the world's largest cryptocurrency yield trading platform, dedicated to the tokenization and trading of yield assets. Pendle provides highly sophisticated yield strategies for individual and institutional users, redefining the future of on-chain fixed income.
