Pendle has spent the past few years following wherever on-chain yield moved next. The sequence has changed more than once: lending interest and ETH staking rewards came first, restaking points followed, and by 2025 stablecoin-linked products had become a major destination for capital. In 2026, tokenized stocks, funds, private credit, and other real-world assets began moving on-chain as well. Pendle brought those assets into fixed-maturity markets, while Boros opened a separate venue for trading perpetual futures funding rates.
Foresight News frames the issue in simple terms: when one Pendle market expires, the previous trade does not roll forward on its own. Buyers have to reassess yield and tenor again, and redeemed capital may leave. Whether Pendle can keep matching fresh assets with fresh demand is what determines how durable the business really is.
Why demand for trading future yield keeps showing up
The article compares the setup to an interest-rate swap. If a company has a floating-rate loan, it can pay a fixed rate and receive a floating rate in a swap, using the floating leg to offset changes in borrowing costs. The party receiving the fixed rate may want steadier income, or may combine that position with other trades. The fixed rate itself is simply the price both sides assign to future interest-rate moves.
On-chain yield changes too. Lending rates rise and fall with supply and demand. ETH staking produces ongoing rewards. The eventual value of restaking points may not be known until a project delivers on them. Pendle V2 lets holders of yield-bearing assets split them into principal tokens, or PT, and yield tokens, or YT. PT buyers acquire discounted redemption rights at maturity and can estimate a return based on their entry price. YT buyers pay upfront for floating yield and related rewards until expiry.
The risk profile is different on each side. If realized yield comes in below expectations, YT buyers may fail to recover their purchase cost. PT holders still face the underlying asset risk and redemption risk.
Boros applies the same logic to funding rates
Perpetual futures funding rates cannot be split in the same way as a yield-bearing token. Traders either pay or receive that fee periodically. Some want to lock in the cost ahead of time. Others want exposure to how the rate may change. Pendle introduced Boros outside the V2 framework so counterparties can exchange fixed rates for floating funding rates.
Although Pendle V2 and Boros deal with different assets, the article says both products are built around the same core function: buyers and sellers are pricing future changes in income or cost.
What happens after old markets mature
When Pendle launched in 2021, it listed lending receipts including Aave’s aUSDC and Compound’s cDAI. Depositors in those assets originally held floating interest that moved with the market. Some were willing to swap that for a return they could plan around over a set period. Others wanted to buy the floating interest itself. ETH staking and later restaking created the next set of assets for the platform.
The 2024 restaking cycle made the two buyer groups especially visible. In Ether.fi’s eETH-related markets, PT buyers wanted to keep ETH exposure while locking in a maturity return denominated in the underlying asset. YT buyers were paying upfront because they expected staking rewards and points to translate into airdrops, while accepting the risk that the eventual payoff might disappoint.
Pendle said in its June 2024 maturity review that about $2.7 billion in PT and liquidity-provider positions were redeemed between June 26 and July 4, with nearly 80% coming from the Ether.fi, Renzo, and Puffer restaking markets. The article’s point is that maturity only closes the previous trade. Whether the money stays depends on whether the next market offers attractive assets and pricing.
Stablecoins became the broader market in 2025
In 2025, stablecoins gave Pendle a much wider pool of assets to work with. Research from Spartan Group and Modular Capital found that stablecoin-denominated assets accounted for more than 87% of total value locked on the platform. Roughly $7.8 billion in positions matured in the first half of the year, while trading volume over the same period exceeded $16 billion. Those figures show users repeatedly choosing across maturities, but they do not prove that every redeemed dollar remained on Pendle.
The income sources behind those stablecoin markets were not the same. Ethena’s sUSDe reflected staking income and derivatives hedging strategies. Sky’s sUSDS reflected protocol savings yield. OpenEden’s cUSDO brought income from short-term Treasury reserves on-chain. Usual and Resolv added project reward structures. In 2025, USD.AI introduced a stablecoin product tied to compute financing in DeFi, with returns linked to infrastructure loans involving GPUs and related hardware.
Users may have been comparing dollar-denominated assets, but the interest-rate exposure, underlying collateral, and incentive structure were different from one market to another. Using sUSDe as an example, the article says buyers who expected future yield to fall and wanted a scheduled return could buy PT. Buyers willing to take on changes in future funding rates and rewards could buy YT. For issuers, that meant one asset could reach different pools of capital.
OpenEden included Pendle among cUSDO’s on-chain use cases when it described the product in April 2025. By May, non-Ethena assets had reached a combined 27% share of Pendle’s stablecoin TVL, with OpenEden, Reserve, and Level already in the market. At Ethena’s peak, about half of Pendle’s TVL, or roughly $7 billion, had been allocated there.
The same concentration effect appeared with newer issuers on other chains. Pendle disclosed that the AUSD market on Monad reached about $230 million in TVL at one point in 2026, and that Pendle held more than 78% of AUSD’s total supply.
The article argues that stablecoin issuance and usage are still expanding. Issuers need holders. Holders compare maturity returns and exit conditions. The partnerships with issuers and the buyer base Pendle built during that period may let it keep organizing trades as the list of stablecoins grows, but every new asset still has to be repriced around its own yield source, buyer expectations, and maturity structure.
2026: USDG, RWA, and fund-linked yield test the next phase
Stablecoin growth continued into 2026. About seven weeks after Paxos-issued USDG entered Pendle, the Pendle SY contract on Ethereum held about $121 million worth of USDG. Dune data showed that on April 17 the contract accounted for 27.9% of Ethereum’s USDG supply. USDG already had other distribution channels, yet Pendle still gathered a meaningful share of holdings.
At the same time, more non-stablecoin real-world assets appeared in 2026, including securities and funds. Pendle said in September that 66 of the markets launched that year were tied to RWA, spanning Treasuries, private credit, stocks, preferred shares, and compute infrastructure.
One example was Strategy’s preferred stock STRC and its tokenized product STRCx, which gave the market a case of periodic payments from a security. Pendle said STRC-related markets topped $50 million in TVL in May. On Robinhood Chain, the NVDA and PFE markets let buyers trade maturity positions in tokenized stocks and pre-maturity dividend exposure. The article stresses that PT holders still face the stock’s own price moves, so buying at a discount is not the same as locking in a dollar return.
Fund-linked returns entered the same maturity framework as well. In September, Pendle partnered with private-markets firm Partners Group to launch the NGI+ yield market on its platform. The market is tied to the net asset value performance of Partners Group’s Next Generation Infrastructure strategy. Investors can trade positions for a given tenor, while the underlying fund investments remain managed by the original institution.
For issuers trying to attract on-chain allocation, the article says tokenization is only the first step. Someone still has to quote future income and provide a market where that income can be traded before maturity.
Each asset type asks buyers to underwrite something different. STRC’s periodic payments depend on the security terms and the issuer’s ability to pay. Stock dividends move alongside stock prices. Fund-share returns depend on the net asset value of the underlying portfolio. PT buyers have to decide whether the discount is enough to cover holding and redemption risk. YT buyers have to estimate future payment or yield changes.
The article also notes that BlackRock and Franklin Templeton are expanding trading or collateral uses for their tokenized funds. BlackRock’s BUIDL already has liquidity arrangements tied to UniswapX, while Franklin Templeton’s Benji fund shares can be used in Binance’s OTC collateral program. If those institutions later want investors to trade fund income more directly, Pendle’s existing listing and trading framework could become one option.
Boros and the market for perpetual funding rates
A third source of demand comes from perpetual futures. Even if a trader gets the price direction right, changing funding rates can still eat into returns during the life of the position. Institutions running spot-perp hedges may also want to lock in the funding they expect to receive. Boros lets users swap fixed and floating funding rates.
A trader facing floating payments can pay fixed and receive floating. If the underlying, tenor, and size line up, the floating leg can offset the funding cost on the original position. The counterparty is the trader willing to take the other side of future rate changes.
The article gives a simple example: a trader shorts a stock perpetual, the stock falls as expected, but ongoing funding payments still reduce the realized profit. Boros trades the change in that funding stream. The stock-price risk remains in the original position. As the underlying set expands to stocks and commodities, each market still needs counterparties willing to trade its own funding volatility and hedge horizon.
Pendle said in February that Boros had surpassed $11.5 billion in cumulative notional volume about seven months after launch. It later introduced Arbitrage with CrossEx, which places two cross-exchange perpetual positions into the same CrossEx unified margin account, using one long and one short to hedge price exposure. Boros then converts the floating funding rates on both sides into fixed rates. The tool calculates margin, fees, and slippage in one place and guides users through all four positions.
According to the article, unified margin reduces the capital tied up in fragmented collateral across exchanges, and coordinated execution lowers the cost and exposure involved in opening positions manually. If the positions are matched and held to maturity, traders can turn the funding-rate spread between venues into fixed income.
What keeps Pendle’s trading loop alive
The final question in the piece is structural. Once an asset is listed, PT needs buyers, and holders need enough depth to sell before maturity. Pendle’s automated market-making system quotes around yield, limit orders add to the book, and its AIM incentive model adjusts reward allocation across markets. Those mechanics shape the price at which large trades can actually clear.
In a PT-sUSDS quote shown by Pendle in September 2026, buying about $50 million carried slippage of roughly 0.05%.
PT’s use in lending markets adds another layer. Aave and Morpho accept eligible PT as collateral, allowing holders to borrow stablecoins while keeping their maturity redemption rights.
That setup still requires lenders to judge whether the underlying asset can redeem, whether PT can be sold during liquidation, and how collateral ratios and pricing should be set. If a user borrows and then buys more PT, the spread between the PT return and the borrowing rate may widen, but liquidation risk rises with leverage. Pendle and Wintermute-owned Armitage launched a USDC vault on Morpho that allocates capital to selected PT-backed lending markets, supplying borrow-side liquidity for those positions.
Foresight News’ broader conclusion is that issuers bring in new assets, fixed-return buyers and floating-yield buyers create the trade, market making and limit orders determine whether large capital can enter, and lending markets give PT another use case. The same trading infrastructure and partnerships that once served restaking could later be reused for stablecoins. The buyer base and pricing habits built in stablecoins can then help screen which real-world assets fit next.
Every new market still has to prove itself through actual trading and through whether capital stays allocated after maturity. Pendle’s long-term business, the article argues, is built in that repeated cycle of repricing and execution.
