Pendle named to Fortune’s Crypto Innovators list among 30 leading projects

Fortune Magazine just published its first-ever Crypto Innovators list, and Pendle Finance made the cut. The list highlights 30 companies that Fortune considers leaders in the digital assets ecosystem, and Pendle’s inclusion puts the yield tokenization protocol in some notable company.

What Pendle actually does

The protocol lets users divide yield-bearing assets into principal tokens (PT) and yield tokens (YT). The principal token gives you a fixed return at maturity, basically locking in your yield. The yield token lets you speculate on whether future yields will go up or down.

Founded in 2020 by TN Lee and Vu Nguyen, the protocol operates across multiple blockchain networks. Its current total value locked sits at approximately $1.15 billion, a substantial sum but far below its peak.

That peak? Over $8 billion in 2025, with an average TVL of roughly $5.7 billion throughout the year.

Recent moves that caught Fortune’s attention

In January 2026, the team introduced sPENDLE, a liquid staking token that replaced the protocol’s previous lockup model. The old system required multi-year commitments from stakers. The new one lets users withdraw after just 14 days.

Before that, in August 2025, Pendle launched its Boros platform on the Arbitrum network. Boros takes a different approach entirely: it tokenizes perpetual funding rates into tradable instruments.

Fortune’s list, published on June 11, 2026, appears to have weighed these innovations heavily.

What this means for investors

For DeFi participants already familiar with yield strategies, Pendle’s evolving product suite opens real doors. The combination of PT/YT splitting, sPENDLE’s flexible staking, and Boros’s funding rate markets creates a toolkit that didn’t exist two years ago.

The risk side deserves attention too. Pendle’s TVL dropping from $8 billion to $1.15 billion shows how quickly liquidity can exit DeFi protocols. Smart contract risk, oracle dependencies, and the inherent complexity of yield tokenization all remain factors that investors need to underwrite before committing capital.

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