Powered by LayerZero: How Pendle Built a $7B Protocol Everywhere

When Pendle Finance launched in 2021, they introduced something genuinely new to DeFi: the ability to separate yield from principal and trade each component independently. While others were iterating on existing staking mechanisms, Pendle created an entirely new market.

The key idea Pendle brought to market was to split any yield-bearing token into two parts: the Principal Token (PT) representing the underlying asset, and the Yield Token (YT) capturing all future yield. Suddenly, users could buy exposure to six months of stETH yield without holding any ETH, or lock in fixed returns by selling their yield tokens to someone else. The protocol had essentially created a zero-coupon bond market on crypto rails, complete with real-time pricing and settlement.

The innovation resonated. By 2025, Pendle has grown to over $7 billion in total value locked - a scale that only 8 other DeFi protocols have matched, with users trading billions in future yield from assets like stETH, eETH, rsETH, and USDe.

One App, Many Chains

The best yield opportunities, deepest liquidity, and most engaged user communities exist across all major blockchains. Protocols that access all of them simultaneously have structural advantages over those limited to individual chains.

Pendle recognized this early. Ethereum has deep staking markets. Arbitrum offers cheap transaction costs. BNB Chain attracts a different regional user base. To capture this liquidity and continue growing beyond the constraints of any single chain, Pendle needed infrastructure that could operate seamlessly across all of them. This led them to LayerZero.

Since March 2023, Pendle has chosen LayerZero as its interoperability infrastructure partner. In that time, they've sent over 39,000 messages across nine chains, coordinating everything from reward distribution to governance decisions. Most recently, in July 2025, Pendle expanded this partnership by deploying $PENDLE as an Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) on three chains (Ethereum, HyperEVM, and Berachain).

The OFT standard gives Pendle unified control over its token supply across chains through a burn-and-mint model with no wrapped assets, no liquidity pools, and no slippage. Supply is unified, transfers are 1:1, and Pendle configures which Decentralized Verifier Networks (DVNs) secure its messages. PENDLE can be moved on Stargate.Finance, which supports transfers for all OFTs. 

Pendle runs one unified protocol across multiple chains. LayerZero is the infrastructure that keeps that system in sync through two key components:

1. Messaging: LayerZero sends messages from Ethereum to other chains. These messages route vePENDLE voting logic, update emissions schedules, and coordinate protocol behavior. Business logic sits on Ethereum while execution happens everywhere.

2. Token Movement: The OFT standard enables native $PENDLE expansion across chains. Just one token that exists natively wherever Pendle operates.

Because LayerZero's endpoints are immutable and permissionless, Pendle doesn't rely on third parties for operational changes. Pendle retains full ownership of:

• All tokens and smart contracts
• All verifier selection and chain support
• All data and value it sends/receives

Coordination at Scale: What Starts with Billions in DeFi Will Scale to Compete with Trillions in TradFi

Pendle is a complex financial system. Its PT-YT setup operates like a real-time, onchain version of zero-coupon bonds, with added programmability, no downtime, and global accessibility.

Traditional zero-coupon bonds require weeks to settle, trade during limited market hours, and involve multiple intermediaries. Pendle's yield tokens settle instantly, trade 24/7, and compose directly with other DeFi protocols. This only works if the entire system stays perfectly synchronized. LayerZero ensures:

• Emissions match voting across all chains
• Token balances align with protocol logic everywhere
• Execution remains predictable regardless of source chain
• Transfers are cheap and expansion is trustworthy

Systems like this represent the future of DeFi – ensuring protocols behave identically everywhere. This includes emissions, rewards, token transfers, and future deployments.

Finance Without Borders

Pendle joins large-scale DeFi systems like Tether, Frax, Ethena, and Ondo that use LayerZero to unify application state across chains. These are full-stack financial systems with messaging, tokenization, and governance coordinated through infrastructure they control.

Pendle's architecture shows what that looks like at $7B scale:

• Innovation that created an entirely new market (yield tokenization)
• Execution that captured massive TVL across multiple chains
• Infrastructure that keeps it all synchronized without compromise

The best teams recognize that to achieve their full potential, they need to be everywhere their users are. And they need infrastructure built for that reality.

As Pendle continues expanding - to new chains, new yield sources, and new financial primitives - the infrastructure remains constant: 

Defined once, used everywhere.