As a long-term investor focused on the DeFi ecosystem, my perspective on the PENDLE project continues to evolve. Initially attracted by its yield tokenization mechanism, looking back at the project's performance as we enter early 2026 is truly worth examining carefully.

PENDLE's current price is around $2.1, with a market cap of approximately $350 million. At first glance, this valuation seems somewhat off—a core innovative product with market valuation that doesn't appear to fully reflect its value. After the intense market volatility throughout 2025, PENDLE's TVL has actually surged to $3.68 billion, and this data speaks for itself. Comparing the growth from the historical low of $0.03 to now is indeed remarkable, but there's still considerable distance to the historical high of $7.5, which is quite telling in itself.

PENDLE's core innovation lies in splitting future yields into two tradable tokens—PT (principal portion) and YT (yield portion). This design allows users to flexibly engage in trading, arbitrage, or lock in fixed yields. Against the backdrop of increasingly mature RWA (Real World Assets) and multi-chain ecosystems, this mechanism has broad application prospects.

An even more interesting development is the ecosystem's performance. vePENDLE's locked value has hit new highs at 66.46 million, with an average lock-in period reaching 1.43 years—data that reflects genuine community confidence. From an application perspective, PENDLE is gradually evolving from a retail-oriented tool into institutional-grade trading infrastructure, with expansion on new chains like Arbitrum and Sonic underway. In the future, it could even become a foundational layer in the derivatives field.

If the DeFi ecosystem recovers in 2026, combined with growth in the perpetual futures market, PENDLE's price targets are pointing toward a conservative range of $13-15, with some views suggesting it could even reach the $40-50 level. The key remains whether the overall market cycle rhythm aligns and whether the project's product iterations can keep pace with expectations.