Introduction

Welcome to Kerne

Welcome to Kerne, the best sustainable yield engine in DeFi.

We built a protocol that generates real, verifiable returns through a delta neutral strategy. Not speculative farming. Not unsustainable incentives. Real yield, sourced from two of the most reliable income streams in crypto: Ethereum staking rewards and perpetual futures funding rates. Combined, they produce a variable modeled rate on the deployed basis (the carry is multiplied by L/(L+1), which is below one, because the hedge is sized one for one against spot), computed live every minute and published at kerne.fi/api/apy. No figure is printed here on purpose: the rate moves with funding on every read, and the one that used to sit in this sentence was stamped 24 July 2026 and had drifted by roughly two percentage points by mid August. It strengthens when perpetual funding is strong, compresses when funding cools, and can turn negative. A separate 3x target at scale was published beside it under its own label until 28 July 2026, when it was withdrawn.

No middlemen. No hidden fees skimmed off the top. On the live route you pay the PSM swap fee to mint kUSD, which steps down with size from 0.10% to 0.05%, and nothing at all to stake it into skUSD. The performance fee that scales with maturity belongs to the KerneVault WETH vault, is charged by that contract alone, and has never been paid by anyone: the vault is whitelist-gated and its share supply is zero.

The Economic Shift

We built Kerne because we saw something that did not make sense. The global stablecoin market exceeds $220 billion. Hundreds of billions of dollars sit in USDC and USDT, earning absolutely nothing for the people who hold them.

We thought that was backwards. So we built something different. A protocol where the yield is accessible for anyone.

The way you access that yield is through Kerne Vault shares (kLP), which appreciate in value as yield accrues. For users who want a stable dollar, the protocol also offers kUSD, a synthetic dollar pegged to $1.00 that can be obtained via the Peg Stability Module or by locking vault shares as collateral.

Navigating the Protocol

This document covers everything you need to know; how the protocol works, what makes it safe, how to get started, and what we are building toward. Whether you are a DeFi native or exploring sustainable yield for the first time, we wrote this to be clear, honest, and thorough.

For what is live on chain right now, what is shipping next, and what is parked behind a named blocker, the public roadmap is at kerne.fi/roadmap. Every line on it links to the surface that proves it.