Pendle's 'Yield Black Hole' Ambition: Betting on Stablecoins, RWA, and Perpetual Contracts

DeFi yield trading protocol Pendle has published a latest long-form article revealing its next-stage development strategy, betting market growth on three major sectors: stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets (RWA), and perpetual contracts (Perps).

Pendle likens its long-term positioning to a "yield black hole," hoping to use Pendle V2 and funding rate trading protocol Boros to absorb yields from different sources into a single set of financial infrastructure.

Among them, Pendle V2 is responsible for handling "yields that exist in on-chain tokens," splitting yield-bearing assets into PT (Principal Token) representing principal and YT (Yield Token) representing future yield, allowing users to trade fixed-income or yield rate exposure.

Boros, meanwhile, targets the perpetual contract market, transforming the originally continuously floating Funding Rate into a financial product that can be traded, hedged, or even locked at a fixed rate. Pendle V2 officially positions itself as fixed-income and yield trading infrastructure.

Pendle states that after five years of development, the protocol has gradually evolved from a handful of early yield pools into a layer of infrastructure for DeFi fixed-income and interest rate markets, and the biggest opportunity ahead comes from the simultaneous expansion of stablecoins, RWA, and Perps.

1. The First Wave Is Stablecoins: Pendle Wants to Become Issuers' "Distribution Channel"

Pendle is first bullish on the stablecoin market. Pendle cites market forecasts indicating that as of mid-September 2026, total stablecoin supply was approximately $300 billion, up about 14% year-over-year; Citi's base case estimates the scale could reach $1.9 trillion by 2030, while Standard Chartered estimates it could reach $2 trillion by 2028.

Even under JPMorgan's relatively conservative forecast, Pendle believes that as long as stablecoin supply continues to grow, the addressable market for yield trading will expand accordingly. Pendle further emphasizes that it is not merely "waiting for stablecoin scale to grow," but has already gradually become a distribution and demand source for some stablecoins.

One of the most obvious cases is USDG issued by Paxos.

Dune conducted on-chain analysis this year on the "Pendle Effect" and found that after USDG launched on Pendle on February 23, 2026, Pendle's SY-USDG contract grew from 0 to $121 million in just about seven weeks, and at one point accounted for 27.9% of the USDG supply on Ethereum, becoming one of the largest single USDG holding addresses/venues on-chain.

It is worth noting that Dune did not directly attribute all the growth to Pendle, but rather cautioned that these data can only prove a high degree of correlation and cannot alone prove causation. However, the USDG case shows that after the Pendle market opened, the newly added USDG supply on Ethereum closely matched the growth of the SY contract, indicating that Pendle may at least serve as an important demand aggregator.

This phenomenon is also called the "Pendle Effect" by Dune: when an asset launches a PT/YT market, the simultaneous emergence of demand for fixed yield, leveraged yield, and points trading may further stimulate demand for the underlying asset.

Pendle stated that stablecoin pools on the platform have already generated about $6 billion in notional trading volume this year. A similar pattern previously occurred with Ethena. Pendle stated that at its peak, about $7 billion worth of Ethena-related assets entered Pendle; Dune's research showed that in September 2025, deposits of PT-USDe and PT-sUSDe on Aave and Morpho peaked at a combined total of about $7.2 billion.

2. The second wave is RWA: 66 markets this year are already linked to RWA

The second bet is RWA. Pendle pointed out that the scale of tokenized RWA excluding stablecoins has increased from about $10 billion in early 2025 to nearly $39 billion currently, growing nearly fourfold in less than two years, with categories including U.S. Treasuries, private credit, commodities, and tokenized equities all surpassing the billion-dollar scale.

Pendle believes that even under a more conservative forecast, the RWA market still has a chance to reach trillions of dollars by 2030, and this year RWA has already become one of Pendle's most important sources of growth.

Pendle stated that among the markets launched in 2026 alone, 66 are related to RWA, covering U.S. Treasury bills, private credit, STRC dividends, tokenized equities, and products generating yield from computing infrastructure.

Currently, Pendle's official market interface has already directly listed "Stocks" and "RWA" as independent market categories, and in September it successively added stock-related markets such as NVDA and PFE. Among them, Pendle stated that approximately $210 million in RWA-backed PT is currently being used as collateral on Morpho.

Strategy's STRC-related market once surpassed $500 million in TVL in May of this year, with cumulative trading volume exceeding $977 million; the USDai market, linked to AI computing infrastructure yields, also reached $568 million in TVL, with cumulative trading volume of approximately $2.5 billion.

In addition, Partners Group, a private markets asset management firm with $185 billion in assets under management, recently entered the Pendle ecosystem with its fund strategies. Pendle believes that RWA is still at a fairly early stage, especially as platforms like Robinhood continue to push tokenized stocks, the boundary between on-chain and traditional financial assets is rapidly blurring.

Pendle also teased that in the coming weeks it will announce a new technical mechanism that will allow assets without inherent yield to also be PT/YT-ized. If realized, Pendle's serviceable scope would no longer be limited to Treasuries, stablecoins, or yield-bearing assets, but could further encompass tokenized assets such as stocks that do not necessarily continuously generate on-chain yield.

3. The third wave is Perps: Boros wants to turn Funding Rate into an asset

The third market is perpetual contracts, and it may also be the part where Pendle differs most from traditional DeFi yield trading. Pendle believes that Perps are gradually becoming the "24/7 market" for global assets. In addition to cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH, RWA perpetual contracts for stocks, gold, crude oil, and other assets are also growing rapidly.

Citing data, Pendle stated that the open interest of stock Perps has now exceeded approximately $6 billion, growing more than tenfold within half a year; stock-related trading volume on Hyperliquid has increased from approximately $4 billion to $212 billion this year.

As the variety of assets covered by Perps increases, another massive derivatives market has emerged: Funding Rate.

Funding Rate was originally just a periodic capital exchange generated by perpetual contracts to keep prices close to spot, but for traders holding leveraged positions for extended periods, it is effectively a floating-rate cost.

The problem is that the Funding Rate volatility of RWA perpetual contracts may be far higher than that of BTC. Pendle points out that this year, holding BTC Perp on Binance required an cumulative payment of approximately $0.03 in Funding per $1 of notional position; but SK Hynix perpetual contracts reached about $0.35.

The volatility difference in Funding Rates is even more pronounced. Pendle states that the standard deviation of BTC's daily Funding Rate is about 5%, while gold and silver reach as high as about 60% to 65%, and SK Hynix even reaches 163%. The larger the scale of RWA Perps, the more traders may need to manage not just directional and leverage risk, but "financing cost itself."

4. What Boros is actually doing is creating an "interest rate swap market" for Funding Rates

This is also the reason Pendle launched Boros. Boros is designed to allow traders to directly trade perpetual contract Funding Rates, converting originally floating Funding fees into fixed-rate exposure.

If a trader holds a long position in Binance BTC perpetual contracts for the long term and needs to continuously pay an uncertain Funding Rate, they can establish a corresponding position on Boros to exchange floating Funding expenses for a predetermined fixed cost. Pendle's official documentation also defines this operation as hedging floating Funding Payment into fixed payment.

Another use case is cross-exchange Funding Rate arbitrage.

Suppose Hyperliquid's ETH Funding implied annualized rate is 8%, and Binance's is 4%. In theory, a trader can simultaneously establish opposite-direction perpetual contracts on different platforms to capture the Funding Rate spread; but if the Funding Rate subsequently changes, the original arbitrage opportunity may also disappear.

Boros, however, allows both sides' Funding Rates to be fixed, converting floating arbitrage into a trade closer to fixed income. Pendle's official documentation gives an example where a trader can simultaneously combine Perp positions on two exchanges with Boros Funding positions, offsetting price risk and floating Funding, leaving only a fixed spread between the two markets.

In August of this year, Pendle further launched an open-source arbitrage tool integrated with Gate CrossEx, simplifying trading strategies that previously required simultaneously managing multiple exchanges, funding positions, and margin. According to official documents, CrossEx is responsible for managing cross-exchange Perps, while Boros handles Funding Rate positions.

In an actual public case, a four-leg BTC arbitrage position at the end of August locked in an annualized return on capital of approximately 20.94%; however, Pendle itself also noted that the relevant data was self-reported by user terminals and can only be regarded as a market snapshot at that time, rather than a fixed obtainable yield.

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