The name
A market is named after its underlying asset and its maturity date, in the form PT-<asset>-<date>: a name such as PT-sUSDE-27NOV2025 reads as a principal token on Ethena's sUSDe with a maturity of 27 November 2025. One asset can have several maturities, each its own market, and one maturity can exist on several chains.
The rates
- Implied APY: the fixed rate a PT bought now carries to maturity, before price impact and the swap fee.
- Underlying APY: what the underlying has earned over the last seven days, as a yearly rate. It is variable.
The difference between the two is not a profit. It is the market's price for the yield to come, set by the trades so far.
The size
- Liquidity: the value held in the pool. Together with the pool's rate range and any limit orders, it decides how far a trade of a given size moves the price.
- Volume: how much traded over a day. It says how often the price is tested, not how deep the pool is.
- TVL (total value locked), where a page shows it, is the value deposited in a protocol or a pool. It says how much is there, not how much can be sold at once.
A rate quoted on a small pool moves as soon as a meaningful size is traded into it. The price impact shown before a trade is the part of that move the trader pays.
The token behind it
The page names the underlying and its accounting asset. The rest of what the underlying is (where its yield comes from, how it is redeemed, who can change its contracts, what has been audited) is not on the market page. Those are the questions each asset page in this encyclopedia answers, with sources and dates.
The date
The days left to maturity turn a price into a rate. Two markets on the same asset with the same implied APY and different dates are different positions: the longer one holds its rate for longer, and its price moves further when the rate changes.
What none of these numbers says
None of them says whether the underlying will hold its value, whether its issuer can change it, or how long the way out takes under stress. An implied APY is a price; when it is high, it is high for reasons the market page does not state.