Pendle cumulative settlement volume reaches $69.8 billion: Treasury bills, private credit, and public company dividends become on-chain yield sources

With the stablecoin market size exceeding $310 billion and the on-chain acceleration of RWA, Pendle is becoming the core infrastructure for the on-chain fixed-income market. Apollo Global Management’s credit funds exceeding $840 billion, Strategy’s STRC listed company dividends, and Paxos’s US Treasury-backed stablecoin USDG have all integrated with Pendle’s PT/YT yield-splitting mechanism, with the protocol settling over $69.8 billion in cumulative yields. (Previous coverage: Circle stock plunges 20%, Coinbase hit hard! New "CLARITY Act" proposes banning "stablecoin yield-bearing") (Background: a16z breaks down stablecoins in 9 charts: Q1 hit $4.5 trillion, 75% is actually domestic payments, not cross-border) Years ago, almost only crypto-native yields were traded on Pendle; now, things are completely different. Looking at Pendle’s asset list, Apollo’s $840 billion private credit fund is on-chain, Strategy’s listed company preferred stock dividends are on it, and Paxos’s Treasury stablecoin is there too. With asset settlement volume up 161% year-over-year, it is clear that the driving force of DeFi has shifted from crypto-native assets to traditional financial yields. Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) issued STRC preferred shares on Nasdaq with an 11.50% annualized dividend rate, paid out in cash monthly. Strategy uses this money to buy BTC, effectively acting as a bridge from the traditional equity market to BTC accumulation. Two independent teams tokenized STRC dividends and brought them to Pendle. Saturn launched its mainnet on April 8. USDat is minted 1:1 with USDC, backed by M0 tokenized Treasuries, offering approximately 11% APY when staked as sUSDat. On its first day, the Pendle pool attracted $5 million in TVL. Apyx took a different route, with apyUSD capturing inflows from two dividends: STRC (11%) and SATA (12.5%). Within 47 days, the total TVL on Pendle surged from zero to $82.6 million. Both teams chose Pendle for a direct and simple reason: STRC dividend rates adjust monthly, and without a tool to convert floating to fixed, institutional capital simply cannot allocate. At the same time, one of the world’s largest asset managers, Apollo Global Management, also joined the Pendle camp. Ember Protocol used Securitize to tokenize Apollo’s $840 billion+ credit fund into ACRED, packaged it into the ERC-4626 vault eACRED, and then split it into PT/YT via Pendle. The final product is an on-chain fixed-rate bond backed by Apollo credit funds, allowing anyone with a wallet to access private credit yields previously available only to institutional investors. In short, this pipeline allows Ember to execute eEARN (stablecoin management strategy) and eTHIRD (cross-chain basis trading, ~20.66% APY) simultaneously through Pendle. USDG, issued by Paxos, is a stablecoin backed by US Treasuries. It is regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and compliant with the EU’s MiCA regulations. It has a market cap of approximately $2.14 billion, with over 100 distribution partners including Kraken, Robinhood, and Mastercard. USDG’s launch on Pendle marks the protocol’s first direct integration with a regulated stablecoin issuer. TVL exceeded $100 million in the first month, and after additional incentives from Paxos, the pool size now exceeds $120 million. Fully regulated, audited government debt can now be traded on Pendle as permissionless yield derivatives, requiring only a wallet to lock in a fixed rate. This is something institutional fixed-income desks have been looking for for a long time, and now everyone can use it. Ethena once brought a peak of over $4.7 billion in TVL to Pendle, making it one of the largest sources of yield. BlackRock’s BUIDL now supports Ethena’s USDtb, and sUSDe yields are expanding from single crypto perpetual funding rates to CLOs, corporate bonds, gold basis positions, and institutional lending. Every time a new source of yield is added, the interest rate pricing on Pendle gains another dimension. Looking at deposit rates, it’s quite painful. Chase savings accounts offer 0.01% APY, USDC on Coinbase offers about 3.5-5%, while STRC and Treasury protocol PTs on Pendle can reach up to 11%. This interest rate spread is the direct driver for