Case Study: Pendle Finance - How Ormi Fueled a $6 Billion DeFi Protocol

The Challenge: Scaling a Multi-Billion Dollar DeFi Protocol

In today's high-velocity DeFi landscape, milliseconds matter. When traders are executing yield-bearing strategies worth millions, data latency isn't just an inconvenience—it's the difference between profit and loss.

Pendle Finance found itself at this critical juncture a year ago, prior to partnership with Ormi. As one of Web3's fastest-growing yield protocols enabling the trading of tokenized future yield, their vision of liberating yield across multiple blockchains demanded infrastructure that existing subgraph hosting simply couldn't provide.

The Transformation: From Data Bottleneck to Real-Time Data Flows

Pendle's partnership with Ormi has revolutionized how blockchain data powers their protocol. Instead of waiting seconds for critical on-chain transaction data on Pendle Protocol, Pendle users now experience near-instantaneous data access at just 10-30ms latency—a performance leap that has transformed the DeFi experience across their protocol.

The ability to deliver real-time smart contract transaction data via Ormi Subgraph without any lag has been transformative for our protocol. What Ormi Labs provides isn't just hosting—it's a competitive advantage that's helping us build the future of on-chain yield markets.

— Pendle Finance

Explosive Growth Backed by Unshakeable Infrastructure

The numbers tell a compelling story of what happens when data infrastructure doesn't just work—it excels:

Despite handling up to 3 million requests per day on high-traffic networks like Arbitrum, Berachain, Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, and Sonic, Ormi's hyperscale infrastructure hasn't flinched—delivering consistent 99.9% uptime across more than a dozen subgraphs spanning multiple chains.

Real-Time Data: The Hidden Catalyst for DeFi Growth

For protocols like Pendle that enable the trading of tokenized future yield, data isn't just a feature—it's the foundation of the entire user experience. Every price feed, yield calculation, and TVL metric must be:

1. Instantly available: Traders make split-second decisions
2. Unfailingly accurate: Yield calculations demand precision
3. Cross-chain consistent: Data must sync across multiple blockchains simultaneously
4. Infinitely scalable: Performance can't degrade as volume increases

Ormi's hyperscale subgraph infrastructure delivers on all four requirements, creating what feels like a real-time data stream of blockchain activity.

Prior to Ormi: Slow Subgraphs, Long Response Times

As one of the largest DeFi protocols specializing in tokenized future yield, Pendle Finance relies on subgraphs to power their mission-critical operations. With over 40 subgraphs each containing approximately 10 million entities and above, the team began noticing critical scalability problems within their existing subgraph setup. Pendle Finance experienced significant performance issues with their existing subgraph infrastructure before migrating to Ormi.

Certain queries powering Pendle's frontend dashboards were taking over seconds to return a response, leading to an incredibly slow and frustrating experience for their 19,000 daily active users. Existing subgraph endpoints became overwhelmed with even moderate traffic, causing downtime and failed responses when data availability was needed the most.

The Transformation: From Data Bottleneck to Real-Time Data Flows

After the migration, they immediately saw a 5x increase in subgraph indexing speed and a 7x decrease in query response times. Pendle's partnership with Ormi has revolutionized how blockchain data powers their protocol. Instead of waiting seconds for critical pricing data, Pendle users now experience near-instantaneous data access at just 10-30ms latency—a performance leap that has transformed the DeFi experience across their extensive multi-chain ecosystem.

Despite handling massive data volumes across high-traffic networks like Ethereum, Arbitrum, BSC, Berachain, and Sonic, Ormi's hyperscale infrastructure hasn't flinched—delivering consistent 99.9% uptime across Pendle's complex subgraph architecture while supporting their continued growth as one of DeFi's premier protocols.

The Ormi Advantage

• Vertically Integrated Architecture The foundation of Ormi's innovation lies in its vertically integrated architecture built on a proprietary data layer. This unique structure combines bare-metal infrastructure with Kubernetes orchestration, creating an elastic system that automatically adjusts to demand fluctuations. During usage spikes or normal operations, the infrastructure scales dynamically without manual intervention, maintaining consistent performance as network activity changes.
• Advanced Caching and Query Optimization Ormi's sophisticated caching mechanisms use predictive algorithms to prepare frequently accessed data before requests arrive, eliminating traditional wait times. The distributed query optimization engine routes requests intelligently across the infrastructure, ensuring each query takes the optimal path regardless of complexity. This approach delivers consistently fast experiences that rival traditional web applications.
• Cross-Chain Consistency with Millisecond Precision In today's multi-chain environment, Ormi excels through advanced synchronization protocols that maintain data consistency to the millisecond across blockchains. This precision enables seamless cross-chain applications without developers worrying about data inconsistencies. The synchronization happens entirely in the background, freeing developers to focus on innovation rather than data coherence.
• Human-Centered Development Experience Beyond technical excellence, Ormi prioritizes developer experience with comprehensive monitoring systems providing real-time insights into performance and usage patterns. Detailed UI analytics help optimize applications for maximum efficiency. A dedicated team stands ready to customize solutions for each integrator's unique requirements, creating a true partnership in blockchain development.

The Future of Blockchain Data Processing

Ormi fundamentally reimagines how on-chain data flows to applications, combining cutting-edge technology with a commitment to developer experience. For teams building next-generation blockchain applications, Ormi provides the hyperscale real-time data processing capabilities necessary for success, bridging the gap between complex blockchain data and user-friendly applications.

Positioned for Institutional Demand

As of March 2025, Pendle's TVL stands at an impressive $5.1 billion according to DeFiLlama, placing it among the largest DeFi protocols in existence. This achievement signals more than just protocol growth—it represents the beginning of institutional adoption of yield-based DeFi products. Ormi's infrastructure was built with this inevitable shift in mind. As traditional finance increasingly moves on-chain, protocols will need data infrastructure that meets or exceeds the performance standards of traditional markets. With latency measured in milliseconds rather than seconds, Ormi and Pendle are already operating at standards higher than many TradFi systems.

The Future: Data as DeFi's Competitive Edge

This partnership between Ormi Labs and Pendle Finance demonstrates a critical truth for the next phase of Web3 development: the quality of data infrastructure directly impacts protocol adoption, user experience, and ultimately, success. As DeFi protocols evolve from experimental projects to serious financial infrastructure, the ability to deliver millisecond-level performance at billion-dollar scale will separate the protocols that achieve mass adoption from those that remain niche curiosities. For Pendle Finance, the liberation of yield across multiple EVM ecosystems isn't just a vision—it's now a measurable reality, powered by data infrastructure built for the next wave of financial innovation.

Explore our comprehensive documentation to understand how we've reimagined hyperscale on-chain data access.

Related Resources

• Case Study: How Mantle Network Reduced Query Latency by 78% at 1,000 QPS
• Developer Guide: Migrating Existing Subgraphs to Ormi
• Whitepaper: Ormi's decentralized data layer