Invest in team not just narratives, i learnt it the hard way
How did pendle became one of the hottest product on DeFi
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Invest in team not just narratives
i learnt this the hard way
How did pendle became one of the hottest product on DeFi
my break down
▶️ Product Development
▶️ Go to market strategies
▶️ Why is it more successful than others
▶️ What problems they need to overcome
I can find gems, im good at this.
However in bear market i will sell, n i sold early on pendle
fully disclosure i hold a small pendle bag, this is a thread to appreciate how smart @pendle_fi team is and not JUST shilling any bags
*although im open any pendle whale to airdrop me
From my point of view every product has
🔹 Protocol User
🔹 Token Speculatores
Pendles Users are
Yield farmers
PT/YT trader
The key success of pendle is it's ability to make the product both easy to understand, at least at surface for one type of user.
Yield trading is not a simple concept to understand as it involves
Change of APY
Maturity (time)
Underlaying of token price change in USD
The pendle made UI for two different type of user
"Earn" for simple stakers
"Trade" for yield traders
From simple user point of view
"Earn" is one click stake to get APY, simple
In which most staker doesnt have to understand how it works but only need to know fixed yield
Which is almost like a Bank fix deposit or a CEX fix staking yield product obviously pendle works very hard to explain & establish the trust n educate it is real yield
From sophisticated user point of view
it creates an opportunty to earn/trade extra yield.
although it has it's flaws but opportunty are there
It provides trades to speculate on yield, leverage long/"short" yield
however capacity is small, more on this later
So the tools were there but why did it didnt get traction till late?
in my opinion was because of the token type offering
ETH staking was unsure as it was pre merge
Stablecoin wasn't that sexy
And
APE
looks
had the problem of
"Underlaying of token price change in USD"
Ape coin & looks staking is hot at the time
but their price was a one way train to hell.
even if u lock in ur APY u wouldnt want to hold it because ur APY is fixed but the price in USD is not.
Example
1 APE = 10 USD, fix apy at 200%
so by maturity (1 year later) u have 2 APE from the fix apy staking
but ape coin now worth 0.00001 in USD
congrats bro u now have 0.00002 usd worth of ape
*using extreme case to show u a point
This changed when GMX's GLP was introduced.
it was something with sustainable yield around 20% at the time with little fear of the price of GLP price going down as it is basically a 25% eth, 25% btc n 50% stable.
GLP is great for pendle because
Underlaying value is stable
yield is stable around 20% ish but yet it fluctuates time to time perfect for speculation
capacity is large
On top of that with the sucess of eth merge the raise of LSDfi provided bunch of
LSD ETH staking, LP pairs asset to be listed on pendle creating a loop of
More TVL, More attention, More trust Postive loop
Why ETH or any ETH lsdfi token pair is good?
Underlaying value is fluctuation acceptable to crypto natives, 1 ETH is 1 ETH
yield is stable
capacity is large
📍In summary from Pendles Users point of view
Pendle UIUX allow both simple & sophisticated usage
Pendle product is composable and easy to plug in any pair which when there was a token with product market fit they can capture it quickly
OK what about for token speculatores what did pendle do right?
Pendle TVL going up
Pendle hitting the narrative keyword G-spot, GMX, LSDfi
Pendle introduced the VE pendle war
Im not going into detail of how VE war works but this attracts
IDO hunters
Airdrop farmers for IDO
Threador looking for new topics to write
Twitter algo go blurrrrrrrrrr
VE pendle war promoted locking
Related IDOs promoted Buy
Token price go flyinggggggggg
followed with binance listing
Ok lets do a mini summary here first
TLDR
pendle is able to
target real both basic & sophisticated users
touching basically any narrative with some form of yield source
creating indirect IDO hype with ve war tokenomics
n well.. binance
Pendle is not without its flaws
Its AMM design currently does not allow YT to be traded in size without slippage, causing it real trading fee not as high.
But i still truly believe pendle as my favourite bet on yield markets
🔥 Why? because of the team & proven execution skill
Starting with co-founder@tn_pendle
A man with a vision + execution skill with charming ability to attract other great members
He understands product, defi but also not just a crypto nerd, he understands what the crypto natives/degen needs as well.
His people skill was able to get @Rightsideonly @PendleIntern + a few guys i won't tag that represent research + product.
TN n rightside was able to win over every crypto CT pre n during pendle started getting traction.
They are one of the few teams that actually reads what different KOLs write understand their audience and connect to us both as friends + engage a professtional relationship with freedom promo in their own way.
Rightside would chat to each of us individually getting feedback as well as care for us personally but not just copy n pasta non meaningul "project updates" n want to free ride us to shill msgs
Right side n Dan actually booked meetings one by one with different kols to chat n share what's pendle's future plans.
Content i don't think we need to say much. @PendleIntern 's content team can make from deep yield strategy to funny af memes
Without sharing too much alpha but show the details n thinking behlind pendle product team
if u look closely the "earn" token offering is actually less than "trade" likely to provide better experience for simple stakers
it's small, but it is the detail that u know this team is built ready for longer runs when competition is tougher n it will.
There are lots of team kinda just got lucky n built a product in demand but lack in details.
First comer advantage doesnt stay for ever
see yahoo google
One more thing
i visited their office
see attached picture
i mean say less bruv.
i know investor's money went into product not flash office
we don't need flashy 50k token2049 booths we just need good product good team good budgeting asian style lmao
bullish on longer runway
this is my thoughts on the whole pendle team, please do take with a grain of salt, im personally charmed by TN n rightside n pendle being the top players in "Yield" sector seem good.
Most teams stop in binance listing, without leaking too much i know they are aiming more, doing more, onboarding more, integrating more, catering more people.
makes me bullish MORE
The problem is how could Pendle approach to common retails in next bull run, this product not too easily to understand for newbie
So, seems like they are trying to direct new potentially user into the “staking narrative” as we have seen in the last cycle. I have to admit that this maybe is the most effective way. But they might have to promote more educating program if they want to raises more Yield traders - which are the other part of their user set.