SECTION 1: APPLICANT INFORMATION
Applicant Name:
Anton Buenavista
Project Name:
Pendle
Project Description:
The Pendle protocol enables permissionless tokenization and trading of yield. Pendle allows anyone to purchase assets at a discount, obtain fixed yield, or long DeFi yield. The protocol enables this by taking yield-bearing tokens and then splitting them into their principal and yield components, PT (principal token) and YT (yield token) respectively, which allows them to be traded via Pendle’s AMM.
Team Members and Qualifications:
- TN Lee, Co-Founder | previously Head of Business at Kyber Network | Twitter: tn_pendle
- Vu Nguyen, Co-Founder | previously Tech Lead at Digix | Twitter: gabavineb | GitHub: mrenoon
- Anton Buenavista, Ecosystem Lead | previously Senior Software Engineer at Kyber Network | Twitter: ayobuenavista | GitHub: ayobuenavista
- Ken Chia, Institutional Business Lead | previously Head of APAC at Abra; J.P. Morgan | Twitter: imkenchia
- Dan Wongso, Growth Lead | Twitter: DDangleDan
- Long Vuong Hoang, Engineering Lead | Paradigm Fellow | Twitter: UncleGrandpa925 | GitHub: UncleGrandpa925
Project Links:
- Dapp: https://app.pendle.finance/
- Website: https://pendle.finance/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/pendle_fi
- Discord: Pendle
- Github: Pendle · GitHub
- Documentation: https://docs.pendle.finance/
- DefiLlama: https://defillama.com/protocol/pendle
- CoinGecko: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/pendle
Contact Information
TG: ayobuenavista
Twitter: ayobuenavista
Email: anton@pendle.finance
Do You Acknowledge That Your Team Will Be Subject to a KYC Requirement?:
Yes
SECTION 2: GRANT INFORMATION
Requested Grant Size:
2,000,000 ARB (Lighthouse Grants)
Grant Matching:
Pendle will continue to incentivize pools with PENDLE via vePENDLE alongside the ARB provided by this grant.
Grant Breakdown:
The ARB grant will be used and deployed over the course of October 2023 (once it is received) through the end of 31st January 2024 and will be used towards increasing yield trading volume, inciting activity on the platform, deepening liquidity on existing pools as well as an additional incentive for users to bootstrap liquidity for newly listed Pendle markets Arbitrum, and finally to encourage activity on protocols built on top of Pendle. Below is the detailed breakdown:
- 55% (1,100,000 ARB) will be allocated to the Pendle pools on Arbitrum to deepen liquidity.
- 40% (800,000 ARB) will be allocated to campaigns to increase activity and trading volume for the Pendle markets on Arbitrum.
- 5% (100,000 ARB) will be allocated to ecosystem integrations that are integrating the Pendle protocol on Arbitrum.
More details on the grant usage are under Execution Strategy below.
Funding Address:
0x7877AdFaDEd756f3248a0EBfe8Ac2E2eF87b75Ac
Funding Address Characteristics:
The funding address is managed by a 2/4 Safe multisig, where each signer is protected with a HW wallet.
Contract Address:
The actual funding addresses will be automated incentive distribution contracts, which will then be deployed once the grant is approved. These incentive distribution contracts will be funded and managed by the multisig mentioned above.
SECTION 3: GRANT OBJECTIVES AND EXECUTION
Objectives:
Our prime objective is to use the grant to deepen liquidity and increase the trading volume on Pendle, bolster the Arbitrum ecosystem, and highlight the yield-trading use case on Arbitrum moving forward. To date, Pendle has achieved $46M in TVL, $13M average monthly trading volume, and 6k monthly active users on Arbitrum with no extra external incentives. We aim to leverage the Pendle brand to attract new users and capital inflows into Arbitrum.
Pendle brings the TradFi interest derivative market into DeFi. In traditional finance, interest rate swaps are the biggest market in the world at >$500T. PT is the equivalent of zero-coupon bonds while YT is the equivalent of coupon payments. Pendle is positioning itself to become a core infrastructure for the next phase of DeFi.
By creating yield markets on Arbitrum, Pendle helps unlock the full potential of yield. Pendle enables users to execute advanced yield strategies, such as:
- Long assets at a discount
- Fixed yield for low-risk, stable growth
- Leverage exposure to future yield streams without the need for collateral
- A mix of any of the above strategies
We are the only yield-trading protocol, which splits the underlying yield from the principal from a yield-bearing asset, to garner enough traction to put a spotlight on the importance of allowing the market to trade interest rates. Ultimately, Pendle introduces a product necessary for a healthy DeFi ecosystem, and this grant will help accelerate that adoption.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
| KPI | Current Progress on Arbitrum | Milestone by end Nov | Milestone by 31 January 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|
| TVL for Pendle Pools | $46M | $60M | $80M |
| Average Monthly Trading Volume | $13M | $16M | $20M |
| Monthly Active Users | 5,000 MAU | 6500 MAU | 8,000 MAU |
How we measure KPI progress:
For TVL and Trading Volume: https://app.sentio.xyz/share/fbe28690s6whiw3h
For MAU: https://dune.com/queries/3075098/5123957
Other analytics data: https://analytics.pendle.finance
How will receiving a grant enable you to foster growth or innovation within the Arbitrum ecosystem?:
We provide a platform for users to speculate and trade on yield for yield-bearing assets in the Arbitrum ecosystem. When we first launched on Arbitrum, we achieved $10.5 million in trading volume in our first month. In the last 7 months of being live on Arbitrum, we have achieved an average trading volume of $12 million and a growth of $45 million in TVL.
As we are a second-order derivatives protocol, Pendle works and integrates existing yield-bearing assets, such as GLP, gDAI, Camelot LPs, wstETH, etc., in order to allow users to trade the yield. This allows Pendle to be significantly synergistic with other existing protocols as we rely on DeFi’s principle of composability to enrich the overarching DeFi landscape on Arbitrum. To date, we have listed 12 pools across 8 Arbitrum protocols namely Lido, GMX, Gains Network, RocketPool, Camelot, HMX, Stargate, and Penpie with more incoming as we list more protocol pools.
We aim to leverage Pendle’s brand and extensive community to further grow of the Arbitrum ecosystem. Therefore, we have some planned collaborations, listings, and product developments in the pipeline which will help further invigorate the yield-trading sector on Arbitrum. As we are the only yield-trading avenue on Arbitrum, we expect users to use and interact with Arbitrum through Pendle even after exhausting the ARB incentives due to the financial opportunities available to trade the yield on Pendle.
Justification for the size of the grant:
While Pendle is known to be the premier yield trading platform on Arbitrum, not many in the Arbitrum ecosystem are familiar with the concept of trading the yield or interest rates. We believe getting a grant from the DAO can help further accelerate our traction there. The size of the requested grant is to ensure the pools on Pendle have a yield that is modestly above the underlying pool’s yield as well as to kickstart additional trading activity through campaigns and quests as described in the earlier sections above. Ultimately, this grant may kickstart a flywheel where users who are initially unfamiliar with the yield trading DeFi primitive would be encouraged to try it out. The expected end result is an increased awareness and usage of yield trading, an overall increase of yield trading volume and TVL, new DeFi use cases via builders building new integrations on top of Pendle, and DeFi strategies that make use of Pendle and other protocols on Arbitrum which further enhances the Arbitrum DeFi ecosystem.
We believe that our track record, commitment to Arbitrum, and the value that this grant can create for the Arbitrum ecosystem justify the size of the grant requested. To date, over 3.45M PENDLE emissions have been utilized towards Arbitrum. Pendle will continue to support the Arbitrum ecosystem with PENDLE emissions moving forward.
Execution Strategy:
Our execution strategy is divided into three categories:
- Pendle Pools
- 1,100,000 ARB (55% of the total grant size) will be allocated to the Pendle pools on Arbitrum to deepen liquidity.
- The allocated grant will be divided across the different pools on Pendle. Specifically, the 1,100,00 ARB will equally be divided across several epochs (an epoch lasts one week starting and ending at Thursday 00:00 UTC) starting from receipt of the grant up until the end of the program on 31st January 2024.
- There are currently 12 pools across 8 Arbitrum protocols to date and are being incentivized with PENDLE via vePENDLE. Each pool per epoch will receive the allocated grant based on the vePENDLE vote weight the pool has respective to the total voting weight on Arbitrum. This encourages users to vote for the Arbitrum pools across the different networks overall, and therefore a pool’s allocation of ARB incentives may change every epoch.
- As each pool is essentially an integration with a yield-bearing asset, Pendle will work closely with the Arbitrum partner protocols Lido, GMX, Gains Network, RocketPool, Camelot, HMX, Stargate, and Penpie with more incoming as we list more protocol pools (such as Kyber’s axlwstETH/wstETH Elastic pool) to highlight these incentives.
- Pendle Campaigns
- 800,000 ARB (40% of the total grant size) will be allocated to campaigns to increase activity and trading volume for the Pendle markets on Arbitrum.
- At least one campaign per month will be done to keep things fresh and to entice users to keep trying out the campaigns.
- Campaigns may include:
- A seasonal trading campaign that takes advantage of Pendle’s newly released Leaderboard feature, the beta as seen here: https://app.pendle.finance/trade/dashboard/leaderboard/valuation. The top transacted volume and net P&L will receive the ARB rewards. This encourages users to explore yield trading and devise strategies to be on top of the leaderboard. Overall, we should expect a growth in volume and user activity from this trading campaign.
- A trading campaign making use of Pendle’s upcoming Limit Order feature. Limit order makers and/or takers will be incentivized with ARB rewards as we expect this to push for more adoption of Pendle’s limit order system, which overall improves liquidity for yield trading and yield trading adoption in the Arbitrum ecosystem in general.
- Pendle’s Campaign page, which is a page in our dapp that features task-based quests a user must fulfill in order to earn rewards, as seen here: https://app.pendle.finance/campaigns. The team will work on Arbitrum-specific creative campaigns that will fuel excitement on Arbitrum. In addition, Pendle will work with other partner protocols on the campaigns to spur activity across the different DeFi protocols from users. Several campaigns will be planned throughout the duration of October 2023 to the end of January 2024.
- Pendle Integrations
- 100,000 ARB (5% of the total grant size) will be allocated for users to explore ecosystem integrations that have integrated the Pendle protocol on Arbitrum.
- Protocols that have integrated Pendle on Arbitrum (such as making use of Pendle’s PTs, YTs, or LPs in some way) is a great way to introduce the rest of what the greater DeFi ecosystem has to offer to our community. Users who make further use of their Pendle assets on other Pendle integrations will be able to receive this allocated portion of the grant as additional rewards in order to encourage users to make further use of the Pendle assets that they hold. Users can perform actions such as use PTs as collateral to borrow against in a lending protocol. Not only does this highlight DeFi’s composability across different protocols, but it further encourages users to explore the burgeoning DeFi landscape on Arbitrum. On-chain actions made by users will be tallied on a monthly basis and be rewarded accordingly.
A distribution contract will be used to facilitate the distribution of the ARB grant across the three categories above.
Grant Timeline:
The ARB grant will start being distributed within 7 days of the receipt of the first payment. The program will continue until all ARB is spent up until 31st January 2024. The multisig used at the funding address mentioned above is an operational multisig that can act reasonably quickly. It will work to try to ensure that rewards are claimed and schedules are loaded in sufficient time to prevent any gaps in emissions.
For each category (as specified above), the following will be the execution timeline:
- Pendle Pools — 55% of the bi-weekly funding will be loaded on a distribution contract for Pendle pools every epoch.
- Pendle Campaigns — 40% of the bi-weekly funding will be saved and then deployed in a distribution contract once a Pendle campaign is live.
- Pendle Integrations — 5% of the bi-weekly funding will be loaded into a distribution contract that will disburse rewards monthly based on user activity on Pendle integrated protocols.
Do you accept the funding of your grant streamed linearly for the duration of your grant proposal, and that the multisig holds the power to halt your stream?
Yes
SECTION 4: PROTOCOL DETAILS
Is the Protocol Native to Arbitrum?:
Pendle was first deployed on Ethereum. Arbitrum is the second network Pendle deployed on and is the second largest network in terms of TVL and first in terms of monthly average trading volume. Arbitrum has been a key pillar in Pendle’s growth and success.
On what other networks is the protocol deployed?:
Pendle is deployed on Ethereum, Optimism, BNB Chain, and soon Mantle.
What date did you deploy on Arbitrum?:
1st March 2023
Protocol Performance:
Our public analytics dashboard: https://analytics.pendle.finance
- $150M++ TVL ($46M on Arbitrum alone)
- $100M++ TVL just on LSDs alone
- $192M++ total trading volume ($500M if including V1)
- ~$1M 24-hour trading volume
- 37.9M (~$24M) locked on vePENDLE
- 15.8M PENDLE locked on liquid wrappers (Pendle Wars)
LPing into Pendle requires you to interact with the underlying protocol to acquire the yield-bearing asset or position. Our pools are comprised of the underlying against the Principal Token. For example, in the case of the Pendle PT-Stargate-USDT pool, it would be Stargate-USDT/PT-Stargate-USDT. Therefore, when depositing into the Pendle pool using USDT, you’d need to interact with the Stargate USDT to first add liquidity into the Stargate USDT pool and then stake that LP into their farm.
With the launch of different Pendle pools on Arbitrum, we’ve helped deepen the underlying protocol’s liquidity as Pendle tokenizes either the yield-bearing asset or the yield-bearing position. Over time, we have managed to own a majority of the liquidity from the underlying protocol. Some of the key contributions include:
- Arbitrum’s rETH pool: 35% liquidity owned, grew liquidity by 57% since launch
- Camelot’s ARB-GRAIL pool: 51% liquidity owned, grew liquidity by 234% since launch
- Camelot’s PENDLE-ETH pool: 70% liquidity owned
- Stargate’s USDT Arbitrum pool: 10% liquidity owned
Source: https://dune.com/pendle/pendle-market-pools-liquidity-dashboard
In terms of unique address and DAU growth over time, we looked at all the transactions that have interacted with our contract and filtered out all the unique wallets. We also use Sentio to calculate these metrics (https://app.sentio.xyz/share/lv18u9fyu1b558xf).
Pendle V2 Unique Addresses: 55k to date (58k if including unique V1 wallets)
Pendle V2 DAU growth over time:
Protocol Roadmap:
Our core focus remains on our yield-trading protocol. Aside from the Arbitrum-specific developments which involve the Pendle Leaderboard and Pendle Campaigns, here is what we expect to accomplish in the next 4 months that works in line with the duration of the program:
- Leaderboard official launch
- Launch of limit orders for yield trading
- Launch of structured vaults
Audit History:
Pendle smart contracts have been audited by Ackee, Dedaub, Dingbats, and some of the top wardens from Code4rena. All of Pendle’s smart contracts are open source.
A complete list of audit reports can be found on our GitHub repo:
SECTION 5: Data and Reporting
Is your team prepared to create Dune Dashboards for your incentive program?:
Yes. Aside from Dune, we can create Sentio dashboards in order to present other forms of data as we’ve been using Sentio for our analytics needs.
Does your team agree to provide bi-weekly program updates on the Arbitrum Forum thread?
Yes, we are committed to updating the Arbitrum Forum thread. We have prepared methods of collecting data and reporting them alongside data dashboards as mentioned above to substantiate our progress. Metrics such as TVL, volume, transactions, and unique addresses will be tracked.
Does your team acknowledge that failure to comply with any of the above requests can result in the halting of the program’s funding stream?:
Yes
