The market is still looking at an older version of $PENDLE.

Price is around $1.26, close to where it traded in March before a 75% move. The difference is that the protocol underneath the token has changed since then.
Back then, Pendle had three clear issues:
- Complex tokenomics
- Low staking participation
- Yield products many people still treated as a niche part of DeFi
The product was useful, but the token design had friction.
Then in January 2026, Pendle replaced vePENDLE with sPENDLE.
vePENDLE required users to lock tokens for up to 2 years, which kept participation around 20%. sPENDLE changed the model with 1:1 staking, 14-day exits, and better DeFi compatibility.
Supply staked has now reached ~58%, so one of the biggest weaknesses in the old design has been materially improved.
The fee side changed too:
- 80% of protocol fees go toward buying PENDLE from the open market
- Buybacks run through an hourly TWAP across the week, creating steady demand instead of one large purchase
- $1.7M bought back YTD, $824K distributed in the last 30 days, as of late June 2026
- Distributions only go to active stakers
That creates a clear split between passive holders and active stakers.
Idle holders still count in the market cap, but they do not receive fee distributions. Active stakers are the ones capturing that value.
On valuation, the ~$13.2M annualized revenue figure was the trough snapshot. Revenue is up 51.7% month over month, as of late June 2026.
At a $216M market cap, that is around 16x trough revenue and closer to 10x on the current run rate.
GMX trades in that same range, while MakerDAO sits higher at 15-20x. So @pendle_fi sits near the cheaper end of the DeFi yield set.
The multiple alone does not explain the setup.
The revenue path does.
80% of fees flow back through buybacks instead of sitting in a treasury. And since non-staked PENDLE still counts in the market cap while earning nothing, active stakers are exposed to a lower effective multiple than the headline number suggests.
Then there is Boros.
@boros_fi is Pendle’s funding-rate trading platform. It is already live and has shown traction, with its deepest market doing around $156M in weekly volume.
This part still looks underpriced.
Boros lets traders lock fixed funding, take floating exposure, or trade rate differences across venues. Rate desks have done this in TradFi for decades. Pendle is putting that logic on chain.
A useful example came during the recent oil supply shock, when some Boros funding rates ran above 900% annualized.
That was a macro-scale dislocation showing up inside a DeFi product, and Boros gave traders a way to take a fixed position against it.
More markets are landing in July:
- WTI and Brent crude oil
- Gold and silver
- Equity perps including NVDA, TSLA, and the S&P 500
This is where Boros starts to matter beyond DeFi yield.
Global perps open interest is somewhere around $150-200B, while Boros is at roughly 0.05% of it. That gap gives Pendle a much larger rate market to grow into.
So the market is still pricing $PENDLE close to its trough version, while the protocol has improved staking, added direct buybacks, and expanded into funding-rate markets.
The price is close to March, but the protocol is no longer the same.