Can the funding rate be traded? Unlock Pendle's next hundredfold growth engine "Boros"

Boros breaks through with funding rates, creating a new realm of tradable yield assets and becoming an important driving force in the Pendle ecosystem. (Background: Understanding Pendle and Boros: Turning funding rates into DeFi derivatives) (Background Supplement: Pendle is complex, but not understanding it is your loss) If you were to select the most innovative DeFi protocol, who would you nominate? Surely, Pendle would be on the list. In 2021, Pendle, as the first DeFi protocol to focus on the “interest rate swap” market, single-handedly opened a yield trading market worth billions, becoming the absolute leader in the yield trading track. And in August 2025, Pendle's innovative core of “daring to be the first” continued as it launched Boros, opening up the on-chain yield blind spot of “funding rates,” bringing trading, hedging, and arbitrage opportunities for funding rates to the DeFi world for the first time, once again sparking public discussion and participation enthusiasm. According to Pendle's latest data, as of now, Boros has been online for two months, with a cumulative nominal trading volume exceeding $950 million, an open contract scale exceeding $61.1 million, and the number of users surpassing 11,000+, with an annualized income exceeding $730,000. In just one month, it has already achieved what many projects take years to accomplish, and many participants excitedly state: playing with Boros yield space can even be more profitable than Meme. So, what is Boros? How does it work? What are the future plans? Many have noticed that Boros's brand visuals often feature a Whale that devours everything, and the term Boros in ancient Greek also implies consumption. With the release of Boros version 1.0, the launch of the referral program, and the introduction of more markets, perhaps Boros's consumption of the yield world is officially commencing through funding rates. Why is “funding rate” the first shot to establish Boros's product reputation? As a structured interest rate derivatives platform, Boros currently focuses on funding rates, aiming to convert funding rates into tradable standardized assets. Most contract users are familiar with funding rates; it acts like an “invisible hand” in the contract market, balancing perpetual contract prices and spot prices. Its specific operational logic can be simply understood as: When the funding rate is positive, it indicates that most people expect prices to rise; longs are strong, and contract prices exceed spot prices, requiring longs to pay funding rates to shorts, suppressing excessive market optimism. When the funding rate is negative, it indicates that most people expect prices to fall; shorts are strong, and contract prices fall below spot prices, requiring shorts to pay funding rates to longs, suppressing excessive market pessimism. As a key to balancing long and short forces, the funding rate is also a critical indicator of market sentiment. Before Boros appeared, traders passively accepted the market control exerted by funding rates, never considering that one day, funding rates could also become an asset that can be traded separately. So, why did Boros choose funding rates as the first shot to establish its product reputation? High scale, high volatility, and high yield are the fundamental reasons Pendle believes it has great potential. High scale: The contract market size has far surpassed that of the spot market, and once the contract market operates, funding rates will continuously flow. According to a CoinGlass report, total perpetual contract trading volume reached $12 trillion in Q2 2025, with an average daily trading volume of about $130 billion; based on most exchanges' 0.01% / 8 hours settlement rule, the daily funding rate market easily exceeds tens of millions and can even exceed billions in extreme market conditions. If we can better utilize this massive and stable market of funding rates, it will undoubtedly give rise to the next heavyweight financial innovation. High volatility: In the spot market, tokens can experience significant price fluctuations within a day, quickly becoming hot topics, but this is the norm in the funding rate market. For example, according to Coinmarketcap data, on September 8, 2025, MYX Finance (MYX) surged over 168.00%, becoming the top gainer among the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization and quickly becoming a hot topic of discussion. Meanwhile, in the bull vs bear battle, funding rates are constantly fluctuating, especially for many alts, where funding rate fluctuations can reach four to five times or even more. For instance, some traders paid as high as 20,000% annualized funding rates to maintain long positions for $TRUMP . Taming this raging beast of funding rates will not only help users better formulate trading strategies but also hide massive profit opportunities. High yield: The core logic is that: volatility creates excellent opportunities for profit. With volatility, there is room for buying low and selling high. The highly volatile funding rate market can also become an important avenue for users to capture profit opportunities. The challenge lies in how to convert funding rates into standardized assets to realize trading, profit, hedging, and arbitrage strategies, which is a significant test of product design skills. How does Boros realize betting on the future rise and fall of funding rates? Upon entering the Boros page, we can see that Boros has launched multiple markets for BTC, ETH, and USDT on Binance and Hyperliquid: As mentioned above, funding rates are key indicators reflecting market sentiment. In other words, if you can accurately perceive market sentiment, you can profit through Boros's funding rate trading. How to translate this market prediction into tangible profits? The core of Boros lies in fixing the current funding rate of the market and using it as a benchmark to provide users with betting options: if the rate rises in the future, those betting long will profit; if the rate falls in the future, those betting short will profit. All of this is achieved through YU. Users can connect their wallets to deposit, enter collateral, and purchase YU. YU is the core means of transforming funding rates into a standardized asset, representing the rights to the profit of funding rates over a certain period in the future. At the same time, YU is also the minimum trading unit after quantifying funding rates. For example, if a user buys 1 YU BTCUSDT Binance, it represents the funding rate yield from a 1 BTC position on Binance BTCUSDT. We know that yield = income - cost. The yield calculation of YU cannot be separated from three core data: Implied APR, Fixed APR, and Underlying APR. Buying YU is equivalent to building a position, which includes two parts of costs: On one hand, Implied APR is the rate locked in when building the position, which can be seen as the price of YU, serving as the fixed annualized rate before maturity. Implied APR serves as a benchmark for measuring future changes in market funding rates, representing the fixed annualized funding rate over a certain period in the future; On the other hand, building a position incurs transaction fees, which along with Implied APR, make up the Fixed APR, which is the cost of building a position. Once the costs are clear, we then calculate income. Through YU, we have fixed a funding rate, while the actual funding rate on external exchanges is through Underlyi…