Idle USDC, operated like a treasury desk.
Kerne configures and operates your stablecoin treasury on Base. Capital stays in your own Safe, sits in a fully reserved position, and is backed by an hourly signed proof of reserves. Exit is not at par: the same tiered swap fee applies on the way out. One fixed setup fee. No custody handoff, no lockup, no token speculation.
A complete treasury health check on a $116M public treasury.
Not an excerpt and not a template. The whole memo, produced against the ENS DAO treasury and pinned to Ethereum block 25,721,000, with the exact command that reproduces every figure printed beside it: address map, concentration, counterparty and venue exposure, the full control surface, a liquidity ladder, an idle-cash line and a dated allocation memo. It is unsolicited and uncommissioned. ENS DAO is not a client, was not contacted, and has not reviewed or endorsed it.
This is what the fee produces. It is the same format, the same discipline about reproducing every figure, and the same section marking what could not be determined.
$5,000
Fixed scope, one entity on up to two chains and up to twenty addresses, delivered within 5 business days of scope confirmation. Fully refundable until we confirm scope with you in writing.
Buying for a company and need paperwork? Request an invoice with a reference number and payment instructions. No wallet needed to ask.
Up to 15 hours of work at the fixed fee. Paid in USDC on Base to the founder-controlled Kerne treasury address, with the on-chain transaction as your receipt, so paying first does not commit you to anything we have not agreed. If your scope is larger than the fixed tier we requote inside the published $5,000 to $15,000 band before any work starts, and you can take the refund instead.
Would rather be invoiced, or want scope confirmed before any money moves? Use the intake form. Nobody is disadvantaged for choosing it. The full fixed scope, including everything this deliberately excludes, is published below in full, and who you would be contracting with is below that. Paying does not skip either of them: nothing starts until we agree scope with you in writing, and until we do, the fee comes back.
Prefer to read first? Download the one-pager (PDF). Kerne's own live protocol numbers, including its TVL, are further down this page under where Kerne is today, and in full on the tear sheet.
A fixed-fee engagement, not a sales cycle
We do the operational work a corporate treasury would otherwise have to learn from scratch: the risk review, the policy, the Safe configuration, the deployment, and the ongoing reporting. The first deliverable is a paid health check that is useful on its own.
We map your stablecoin balances, your venue, custody, bridge and concentration risk, your same-day liquidity ladder, and your idle-cash leakage. You receive a one-page treasury memo and a recommended allocation. Up to 15 hours, delivered within 5 business days of scope confirmation. This stands alone: you are under no obligation to deploy a dollar afterward. The fixed tier covers one entity on up to two chains; larger scope is quoted inside the published $5,000 to $15,000 band before any work starts. The full scope, and what it deliberately excludes, is set out below.
We write your treasury rules in plain language (concentration caps, a minimum same-day liquidity floor, approved venues, and a pre-defined unwind path), then configure your own multisig Safe and the operational rails around it before any capital moves.
Approved USDC is moved into kUSD through the on-chain Peg Stability Module at a 1:1 rate less the published swap fee: fully reserved, and redeemable for USDC at any time through the same module, where the same fee is charged again on the way out. The capital never leaves your control. Your keys, your Safe.
A daily exposure view, the signed proof-of-reserves trail covering your position, and a board-ready monthly export for your accountants. Retainer-based oversight, not a black box.
What the health check includes, in full
A fixed price is only honest if the work behind it is bounded, so here is the whole of it: what you receive, what you are buying, and what this deliberately is not. These are the terms of the engagement, not a summary of them. No health check has been delivered to an external client yet, so rather than ask you to imagine the output, we produced one and published it in full: a complete health check on a $116M public DAO treasury, in exactly the format a buyer receives, with the call that reproduces every figure printed beside it.
What you receive
- •A one-page treasury memo: what you hold, where it sits, and the risks that actually matter, written so a board can read it without a translator.
- •A risk map across venue, custody, bridge and counterparty concentration, with each exposure stated as a number and a share of the balance rather than a colour.
- •A same-day liquidity ladder: how much of the balance you could turn into dollars today, inside a week, and inside a month, and what each step costs you.
- •An idle-cash line: what the balance earns today against a conservative benchmark, and the difference expressed in dollars per year rather than basis points.
- •A recommended allocation, with the case against it written as plainly as the case for it.
- •One round of written follow-up questions after delivery, answered in writing.
What you are buying
- •Up to 15 hours of work at the fixed fee. If the work runs long, that is ours to absorb, not yours to fund.
- •Delivered within 5 business days of scope confirmation. The window pauses only for something we are waiting on from you, and we tell you the day it happens.
- •The fixed tier covers one entity on up to two chains, and up to twenty addresses or venues in total.
- •Scope is agreed with you in writing before any work starts, and paying up front is not the same as buying: until that scope is confirmed you can ask for the whole amount back for any reason, and we return it without a fee and without a discussion.
- •If scoping shows the work is larger than the fixed tier, we requote inside the published $5,000 to $15,000 band before starting. If you do not like the requote you take the whole amount back instead.
What this is not
- •Not an audit and not a security review. We do not review your contracts here. If that is what you need, the Whitehat Desk is the fixed-price pre-audit sweep, and a full audit is a different budget again.
- •Not investment advice, and not a recommendation to buy or hold any asset. We hold no licence to advise and we are not your adviser.
- •Not legal, tax, regulatory or accounting advice, and not a compliance determination. Take the memo to the people who are licensed for those.
- •No custody and no keys. Your funds stay in your own Safe throughout, and we never hold, move, or have the ability to move them.
- •No on-chain execution. We do not sign or send transactions on your behalf. Every action is taken by your own signers.
- •No solvency opinion on any third party you hold. We report what public data shows and mark the boundary where it stops.
- •Our total liability on the engagement is capped at the fee you paid for it, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss.
The work is performed by Kerne's founders personally. There is no incorporated company behind this engagement, which is stated in full under who you are dealing with and in the terms. If your mandate requires an incorporated counterparty in a named jurisdiction, Kerne does not meet it today, and we would rather you learn that here than after you have paid.
Why a treasurer can operate this
Every assurance below is something you can check yourself, today, without taking our word for it. That is the entire point.
Capital stays in your own client-controlled Safe or an explicitly approved deployment path. Kerne is infrastructure, not a custodian. We never take possession of your funds and there is no path by which we could.
Protocol administration sits with a 2-of-3 Gnosis Safe on Base, with the first signer hardware-backed. On the money-path contracts no single key can move protocol funds or grant roles. Since 2026-08-06 two keys are not enough on their own either: admin and manager rights on kUSD and on all three PSM modules moved to a TimelockController with a 48 hour delay, so a change to the mint or redeem path is scheduled in public and sits visible for two days before it can land. Emergency pause is deliberately exempt and stays instant. The delay does not cover everything, and the gap is worth knowing before you find it: the skUSD staking vault holds most of the kUSD in existence and the Safe still holds sole admin over it with no delay. The deployer Trezor renounced both of its skUSD roles irreversibly on 2026-08-02, so no single key can alter that vault either, but two signatures there still act immediately. Both transaction hashes are at /security/skusd-admin-status. Verify it: 0x52d3E450bA6c299B1B07298F1E87DD74732D4877.
Every hour the protocol publishes a signed attestation of reserves at /api/por/signed. The signature is EIP-191 over the attestation hash; recovering the signer takes three lines of code. Backing is not asserted, it is attested and checkable.
When the delta-neutral hedge is open it runs on a single venue, Hyperliquid, and we say so plainly rather than imply a diversified book. The hedge engine is live and runs a pilot-scale short, sized against a small disclosed founder-custodied float (see kerne.fi/api/por); multi-venue routing exists in the engine and arms as venues are added.
Outstanding kUSD is backed 1:1 by USDC held in the Peg Stability Module. Exit is not at par: you redeem through the same module at the published tiered swap fee, with no lockup and no cooldown. Exit is symmetric with entry, which is to say the same ladder is charged in both directions, and how much can leave in a single transaction is published live on the reachable exit depth panel.
14 of 18 deployed contracts are source-verified on both BaseScan and Sourcify; the 4 pending rows are disclosed with reasons. The full registry and an independent verification guide live in the data room.
How capital is sequenced
We are deliberate about the order, and we sequence it the way an institutional desk would require rather than the way that markets best.
Approved USDC becomes kUSD at a 1:1 rate less the published swap fee, fully reserved, and redeemable through the Peg Stability Module at that same fee whenever you want, with no lockup and no cooldown. This is a transparent, liquid, cash-equivalent position with a verifiable backing trail. It is not a yield product, and we do not present it as one.
Kerne's yield engine (Ethereum staking rewards plus Hyperliquid perpetual funding, designed for net-zero directional exposure at scale) is live and runs a pilot-scale short against a small disclosed founder-custodied float while the book is seeded through Genesis. The staked, yield-bearing path (skUSD) is live and open to treasury capital. We gated that path on the external audit on purpose, and Hexens published its final report on July 31, 2026, so that condition is met. We never promise yield on held kUSD.
A mint funds its own exit leg. The USDC you mint with is deposited into the mint module and stays on its balance, in the same transaction that mints your kUSD. So the reserve your own redemption draws on is your own deposit, not the standing figure. A $250,000 mint adds $250,000 to that module's reserve as it happens, and our redeem router sends a redemption to the smallest module that fully covers it, which at that size is the module holding your own deposit. The standing figure measures something narrower and we publish it because it is the harder number: what a holder who did not mint can take out in one transaction today.
What that does not do is make the exit free or unconditional. Exit is not at par, because the same tiered swap fee applies on the way out, and redemption carries the same gates as minting, including a pause the operator controls. There is no lockup and no cooldown on this path.
The published skUSD APY is a live formula output, variable, computed from public Lido and Hyperliquid data. The current reading reflects a positive-funding regime, and it is estimated from a trailing funding window, which by the endpoint's own published note has historically read high against what was then realized. Expect the through-cycle number to be lower than whatever is on screen. We do not publish a through-cycle band, because we have no realized distribution history that would support one, and that gap is itself published on our Honesty Index. It is a modeled rate, not a fixed promise. Methodology is open at /api/apy and /docs/yield-methodology.
Where Kerne is today, stated plainly
- Early. Kerne has been live since 2026-05-14. TVL and holder count are small. The live numbers are printed below, read from public endpoints in your browser rather than typed in by us, and we publish them rather than hide them.
- One external audit, and the deployed vault is not the audited build. Hexens fieldwork ran from July 13, 2026 and the final report published on July 31, 2026, in full, with two of its ten findings acknowledged rather than fixed and the live vault running earlier bytecode than the reviewed commit. Alongside it the verification story rests on the signed proof of reserves, the verified source, and a corpus of over two hundred self-found findings, of which the named findings and their live statuses, open ones included, are published at /security/findings-tracker. The full internal reports go to counterparties on request under NDA rather than to the open web, because they carry exploitation detail against contracts that are not yet remediated.
- Single venue. The funding leg runs on Hyperliquid alone today. Multi-venue routing exists in the engine and arms as venues are added.
We put the unfiltered version in one place so you can diligence it quickly: the data room and the security pages state every known weakness before you ask. Judge the machinery, not the odometer.
All of that is still us marking our own paper. The checks that are not ours are collected at /security/independent: a twenty-day public technical review on the Euler governance forum by someone we neither chose nor paid, a watchdog registry that re-derives every correction we file before it records it, one audit we did pay for, and an unsolicited review from a security team that refused payment twice. Each entry links its primary source and states what that reviewer left open, which for the forum review is four build items we have not built.
Read live from the same public endpoints anyone can call. Nothing below is hand-entered, so it cannot quietly drift from reality.
skUSD APY, modeled
5.87%0.00%realized
Deployed basis, variable, not yield paid. Realized is annualized skUSD share-price growth over 30 days, which is what has been paid.
/api/apyComposition: wallets outside Kerne hold under 1 percent of outstanding kUSD. The rest is founder-owned, most of it staked. Read TVL as the reserve backing the unit, not as third-party demand.
A note on where this sits, because we would rather say it than have you notice it. Until 2026-08-13 this strip rendered directly under the heading at the top of this page, which meant the first number a reader of a services page met was our own four-figure TVL, several screens before the service it was reading about. The health check is a measurement product and its price does not depend on our balance sheet, which is why the worked example at the top is on a $116M treasury and not on ours. So the strip moved here, into the section about exactly this. Nothing was deleted, nothing was rounded, the endpoints are the same, and the numbers are the same live reads they always were. They also lead the tear sheet and the data room, where a reader is asking about the protocol rather than about the service.
Run a protocol of your own? The same signed proof-of-reserves stack is a standalone product: a one-time signed statement of your reserves a counterparty can verify themselves, one flat fee, delivered in days. See the Proof-of-Reserves snapshot.
Fees, in full
Every figure below prices this service, a mandate to work on your treasury. None of it is charged by a Kerne contract, and none of it applies to you because you hold kUSD or skUSD. We lead with the setup fee and the recurring oversight, not with incentive fees. Everything is quoted up front and agreed in writing before any work begins, and no mandate has been signed to date. What the health check fee buys is not left to your imagination either: a complete worked example is published at /institutional/sample.
| Service layer | Commercial structure |
|---|---|
| Treasury health check | $5,000 fixed scope, payable up front. Larger scope $5,000 to $15,000, quoted first |
| Onboarding and policy design | $10,000 to $30,000 one time |
| Monitoring and reporting retainer | $3,000 to $10,000 per month |
| Assets under management fee, discretionary mandate only | 0.50% to 1.25% annualized on assets placed under Kerne's management |
| Performance fee, discretionary mandate only, where authorized | 10% to 20% of yield above an agreed benchmark |
On-chain, kUSD mints and redeems through the Peg Stability Module at a published swap fee that steps down with size, set in the contract where anyone can read it: 0.10% base, 0.08% from $50,000, 0.07% from $250,000 and 0.05% from $1M or more per swap. Call getFee on the module for the exact figure at your size. There are no private exemptions.
The protocol charges no management fee, and no deployed Kerne contract has a mechanism to charge one. That is the whitepaper fee table and the binding version in our terms. The 0.05% deposit fee and the 0%, 5% and 10% performance tiers you will find there belong to the KerneVault WETH vault, which is whitelist-gated and holds no depositor. The two rows above are the price of a discretionary service, and the difference between the two schedules is what they govern, not a change of mind about either.
Who this is for
Operating cash held in USDC, USDT, or DAI that is sitting idle in a Safe earning nothing.
Teams managing runway on-chain that want the idle portion working without taking on custody or smart-contract risk they cannot see.
Desks parking stable balances between deployments that value transparent, liquid, redeemable positions over locked yield.
Smaller DAOs and token treasuries that hold significant stablecoins but lack a dedicated internal treasury desk.
There is no minimum balance. This page used to state a $500k floor and we removed it on 2026-08-04: our own balance sheet is the four-figure number shown live under where Kerne is today above, so a floor that turned away anyone smaller than half a million dollars was a posture rather than a constraint. The health check is fixed-scope and fixed-price, and the work is the same at $200k as at $20M. Teams already comfortable operating a Safe and reading on-chain reporting convert the fastest.
Who you are dealing with
The person who answers this page, scopes the work, and signs is Liam Lakevold, co-founder. Write to liam@kerne.fi and he is who replies. The fuller version, including what is deliberately not claimed about headcount, is on who runs Kerne.
Kerne has not incorporated a company, and it is not in the process of incorporating one. That is a decision, taken on 14 August 2026, rather than a step still pending: the offshore formation this page previously described as paused is not being pursued. An engagement here is a services agreement with the founders personally, and no governing law is asserted. That is stated in full in our terms, and it is deliberately not buried: if your mandate requires an incorporated counterparty and a named jurisdiction, Kerne does not meet it, and you should learn that here rather than three calls in.
What that does not mean is that you are stuck with a personal counterparty forever. Engagements are contracted with him personally today, and the agreement carries a novation clause: if and when a Kerne entity is incorporated, the agreement transfers to it on the same terms, with your consent given in advance in the agreement itself. Personal execution is not a workaround Kerne invented for you: the external security audit was contracted the same way, with the founder signing as an individual and no entity anywhere in the document, and the firm's own legal process accepted it. That engagement is a plain service contract and carries no novation of its own; the clause offered here is the one the investment instrument uses, and it is offered rather than waiting to be asked for.
What is not one person is the money path. Protocol administration is a 2-of-3 Safe on Base, 0x52d3E450bA6c299B1B07298F1E87DD74732D4877, and in an engagement your capital stays in your own Safe throughout.
Correspondence hygiene, because this page asks for real money: replies come from kerne.systems@protonmail.com, which is the same operator as liam@kerne.fi (that address forwards and is not a sending address). Automated notices come from watch@kerne.fi. Anything about Kerne arriving from any other address is not us.
Start with a treasury health check
Tell us what you are holding and where. We will scope your idle stablecoin balances, the risk you are carrying, and what a conservative allocation looks like, and send you a one-page memo. No commitment to deploy.
Already decided? Pay for the health check now.
$5,000 in USDC on Base, fixed scope, one entity on up to two chains. The payment goes to the founder-controlled Kerne treasury address and the on-chain transaction is your receipt. It is fully refundable until we confirm scope with you in writing, so paying first does not commit you to anything we have not agreed. If your scope is larger than the fixed tier we quote the balance inside the published $5,000 to $15,000 band before doing any work, and you can take the refund instead.
Want to see one before you buy one? Read a complete health check we produced on a $116M public DAO treasury, in the same format you would receive, with the command that reproduces every figure printed next to it.
Buying for a company and need paperwork? Request an invoice with a reference number and payment instructions. No wallet needed to ask.
Would rather be invoiced, or want scope confirmed before any money moves? Use the form below instead. Nobody is disadvantaged for choosing it.
Would rather diligence us first? Read the data room.
Planning an allocation but waiting on the audit window? You can register a soft, non-binding indication of intended size in the commit queue before you deploy.
Sizing a founding anchor deposit? The terms are published in full at anchor terms, with the Opal points rules they incorporate at the anchor tier. If you would rather issue your own dollar than allocate into ours, we scope that as an engagement at deploy the stack.
Want the short version before the long one? The tear sheet is one page. The work we scoped, measured and then declined to do is logged, dated and append-only, at refused, and it includes the times our own hypotheses failed.
Kerne is infrastructure, not a custodian or an investment adviser. Nothing on this page is investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. kUSD is a protocol-issued synthetic dollar, not a fiat-backed payment stablecoin; kUSD itself pays no yield for holding it, and yield exists only through the separate skUSD staking receipt. Figures shown live are read from public endpoints and are variable. The health check entry tier is a fixed price for a fixed scope; every other service fee shown is an indicative range and is confirmed per engagement.