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Today’s crypto headline is Lighter’s LIT token going live, marking an important moment in the ongoing battle for market share. In today’s news, we’re breaking down one of the most overlooked growth perps (Pendle via Boros), and taking a closer look at Solana’s watershed development.
Signs
Markets started the last week of the year at a low level. Bitcoin (-0.81%) underperformed its US benchmarks, while the Nasdaq (-0.59%) and S&P 500 (-0.39%) posted slight drags after tech stocks drove the S&P 500 to all-time highs last week. Meanwhile, Gold (-4.04%) and other precious metals fell sharply amid profit-taking, having been the best performers of the past few weeks.
Back on the crypto front, Perps (+1.3%) was the only index to end the day in the green, HYPE leading gains ahead of Pictures of TGE today. Competition for market share of perps has intensified in recent months. Lighter has shown that the certainty and zero trading fees can drive the market volume, leading the trading with more than $200 billion in the last 30 days, followed by Aster ($172 billion) and Hyperliquid ($161 billion). That said, Hyperliquid is still the only one of the three operating without incentives and is the clear leader in revenue, making ~$47 million in the same period.
The real test will be whether Lighter can maintain volume control after TGE, especially since many are pointing to its recent growth in agriculture. In the announcement thread last night, the team explained the nature of the tokens and the details of the airdrop, noting that “the cost of all the light products and services will increase completely for those who have LIT” and that the laboratories will work for the price. The distribution of tokens is divided between the environment (50% of all products) and the group/seller (the remaining 50%), with 25% of all products sent to point holders from Seasons 1 and 2.
At the time of writing, LIT is trading at a market capitalization of $695 million with a FDV of $2.8 billion. According to DeFiLlama, the protocol has been developed $8.76 million in earnings over the past 30 days ($105 million annually), implying LIT trades at a P/S of ~7x and FDV/Sales of ~27x.
Market changes
While everyone is busy arguing about who will win the perps race (especially the Hyperliquid vs. Lighter chatter after Lighter’s TGE), the biggest winner may be hiding in plain sight: Pendle, via Boros. In my opinion, Pendle should benefit from the growth and establishment of a permanent future, regardless of who controls it, on the CEX or DEX rail.
Pendle launched Boros in early August 2025, bringing to DeFi a new onchain currency: the exchange of interest. One can think of Boros as a perps exchange itself, but with two key twists. First, instead of betting on the movement of stock prices, one is betting on the movement of yields. Second, although eternal (as the name suggests) is timeless, Boros markets have a maturity date.
Although Boros has spread slowly, the initial appeal has been strong. As shown in the chart below, daily interest (OI) to maturity reached $245 million on Dec. 26, 2025, when eight markets with $177 million combined in OI ended. The growth pattern in OI is very cyclical, like Pendle v2, showing natural peaks and troughs around maturity and redemptions that lead to markets.
As for its basic mechanism, Boros supports trading of currency rates and generates a product called Yield Unit (YU). For those familiar with the Pendle v2 markets, YU is the same as the Yield Indicator (YT), and represents the future yield of the underlying asset until its maturity. Traders can go long or short YU.
- Long distance: If a trader is long 2 YU-BTCUSDC-Hyperliquid at 10% mean APR, he commits to pay a fixed 10%, while receiving an APR (interest rate) equal to a 2 BTC position in Hyperliquid BTCUSDC.
- Short field: In the short term, the seller can commit to paying the floating APR in return for a fixed APR, determined by the APR that defines the time they entered the position (10% in this example).
At Boros, prices are updated periodically at the same time as the exchange rate. For example, coin prices on Binance are reset every eight hours, so Boros prices for Binance pools are reset every eight hours. Likewise, Hyperliquid’s coin prices are settled on an hourly basis, and Boros prices for these pools follow the same hourly schedule. At maturity (or when the position is closed), if the average Low APR > the average APR at entry, the long position will benefit and vice versa.
Beyond OI, which currently stands at ~$88 million, another important metric for Boros is sales volume. As shown in the chart below, Boros has managed $6.8 billion since its inception, with an average month of around $1.5 billion over the past four months.
Boros has two payment tiers: (1) a fixed fee on top of the APR defined for each exchange, which varies by market, and (2) a fee of 0.2% of the fixed APR portion of each YU during the fixed period. The chart below shows that Boros has generated ~$300,000 in revenue since its inception, averaging ~$67,000 in monthly revenue over the past four months. Notably, the cancellation fee remains negligible, reaching ~$1,300 since its inception.
Exchange rates are proportional to the volume of trade. In a market with an exchange rate of 0.05%, traders will benefit if the APR changes by 0.1% on their behalf (with no return on yield), since traders will open and close the position, thus spending 2x the fee. On the other hand, the OI fee (0.2% of the fixed APR during the fixed period) follows Boros’ OI growth strategy.
Although Boros’s bull case is that it is a place to take DeFi interest (from the amount of money to stablecoin yield, market prices, LST yield and more), its biggest opportunity in the next six to twelve months is stable. Boros started with BTCUSDT and ETHUSDT perps markets on Binance in August, but expanded to additional places (Hyperliquid and OKX) and commodities (HYPE). The chart below shows that OI was dominated by Binance in the beginning, but now it is distributed equally in all places since Dec. 29: Binance (37%), Hyperliquid (35%), and OKX (29%).
In terms of capital control, the ETH-USD market is still the largest on Boros and OI, followed by BTC-USD and HYPE-USD.
The main advantage of Boros is that it benefits from regular maturation without being tied to any one place, because it can support the exchange of many goods. As more and more participants enter the space, they need the options that Boros allows for: locking in long-term payments, locking in short-term income, or trading cash and carry. Looking ahead, when perps are getting legal recognition and many traditional companies are selling RWA perps as equities and stocks, these players want to sell TSLA YUs, gold and hundreds of other things on Boros.
Today, Boros represents less than 5% of Pendle v2’s revenue, but it is poised to become a key player in the development of the protocol and may eventually rival or surpass v2 over time.
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