Pendle

Pendle is a decentralized finance protocol that turns future yield into a tradable asset — letting users separate, price, and trade the yield of an underlying token independently from its principal.

The complexity sits in the primitives. Principal Tokens (PT), Yield Tokens (YT), maturity dates, implied vs. underlying APY, liquidity depth, and the risk attached to each must all be legible at the moment of decision — or the product is unusable to anyone but quants.

Pendle splits any yield-bearing token in two: a Principal Token you redeem at maturity, and a Yield Token that captures the stream of yield until then. Both parts trade on an open market, so their prices imply a rate — the market’s live opinion on future yield. Users can lock in fixed yield, long or short future rates, or provide liquidity.

That same machinery is what made it intimidating: before committing capital, users had to hold several abstractions in their head at once and trust their own math.

• PT and YT values drift in non-obvious ways as maturity approaches.

• Implied APY vs. underlying APY — easy to confuse, costly to misread.

• Maturity, slippage, and liquidity all affecting the real outcome of a trade.

• Risk that had to be communicated honestly without scaring users away.

Pendle serves two kinds of users, and the design meets each on their own terms. For the sophisticated user who wants to understand the machinery before trusting it, I translated each concept into the UX itself — visual explainers that walk through the PT / YT split at the exact moment they meet it, so the interface teaches while it’s being used.

Not everyone learns at the moment of the trade, so the whole path is designed like a product rather than a pile of links: in-app explainers, docs, video, and Pendle Academy all sit behind one hub, organized by difficulty so users ramp at their own pace.

At the deep end sits the written reference. Pendle Academy turns the documentation into a curriculum — Beginner to Advanced — so the depth becomes a path someone can walk, not a wall of pages to search.

The other user doesn’t want a lesson — they want the outcome. For them, the complexity is folded away: routing, wrapping, and intermediate tokens collapse into a single action; smart defaults handle the machinery; advanced controls sit one layer deeper, out of the way until asked for.

The result: a trade that touches five contracts reads as one decision — and neither user is forced into the other’s experience.

I translated the protocol into flows, screens, and data visualization that let a user understand a position before they take it — turning math into a decision they can read at a glance.

Beyond the app, I designed and shipped the Pendle marketing site — the landing page that gives new users their first impression and gives partners and press their reference point.

The same care extends to marketing: an illustration system for launches, partnerships, and campaigns — every piece drawn in one visual language, so each announcement compounds the brand instead of diluting it.

I built Pendle’s brand identity as a system: a logo suite, typography, and a tokenized color palette that keep a high-stakes financial product precise, restrained, and confident on every surface it touches.

Codified and published as a public media kit, it’s the shared source of truth that internal teams, partners, and press all build from.

To keep that language alive beyond my own hands, I built Pendle Canvas — a design tool that turns the system into a library anyone on the team can compose with, on brand by default.