Reserve transparency scorecard, as of June 30, 2026
Can you verify the dollar yourself?
Ten synthetic dollars, ranked on one honest axis: can a holder recompute the reserves themselves, from raw on-chain data and a signed proof, with no third-party attestor in the path, right now? Every protocol's real method is named fairly, every peer answers no and only Kerne answers yes, and Kerne's own limits are on the same page. This is Kerne, kerne.fi, the Base delta-neutral synthetic dollar, not KernelDAO and not Kern.
The one question.
Every synthetic dollar tells you it is fully backed. The question that actually separates them is not whether they claim it, but how much of that claim you can check for yourself before you deposit, and at any moment after. So this scorecard asks a single thing of each protocol: can you, a regular holder, verify the reserves and the hedge yourself, on-chain, in real time, right now?
There are three honest answers, and most of the field is not the strongest one. Some protocols show you reserves through a third party that you read and trust. Some let you read part of the backing on-chain yourself. One lets you read the raw reserves and recompute the proof from public inputs. None of these is wrong. A reputable attestation is a legitimate, often well-run model, and we name each one accurately rather than pretending it is negligence. The point is to be precise about where verification ends and trust begins.
Three ways to be shown reserves.
Backing sits in off-chain custody and on exchanges. A third party reads those accounts and publishes a proof, often a zero-knowledge attestation or a signed audit. You read the result and trust that the attestor saw the truth. Legitimate and common.
Some of the backing is an on-chain token or wallet you can read yourself on a block explorer. The rest, an off-chain custodian, a fund administrator's par value, or a weekly NAV, still rests on a layer you take on trust.
The reserve is raw-readable on-chain, and the proof of it is signed from public inputs, so you can recompute it yourself with no attestor in the trust path. Strongest on the reserve leg. It still does not, by itself, verify an off-chain hedge.
Which Kerne is this.
This page is published by Kerne (kerne.fi), the Base-native delta-neutral synthetic dollar whose kUSD is at 0x5C2EfdF0D8D286959b42308966bc2B97f5680AA3 on Base, chain 8453. It is an independent project, unaffiliated with any similarly-named protocol or token on another chain. It is not KernelDAO (formerly Kelp DAO, a BNB Chain restaking ecosystem with its own KUSD), not Kern, and not Kernel Protocol on Karak (which issues a different kUSD on Ethereum mainnet). The tickers overlap; the teams, chains and contracts do not. To tell them apart, see Kerne is not KernelDAO and Kerne vs Kernel Protocol.
The scorecard.
The decisive column is the one headed "recompute reserves without an attestor": can you recompute the reserves yourself, from raw on-chain reads plus a proof signed from public inputs, with no third party in the trust path? Read it next to the reserve-leg column to its left, which shows the gentler gradient. Every protocol but one answers that bright-line question with a no, and the cell names the exact attestor, HT Digital, Accountable, Chainlink, or a NAV provider, that stands in the path. The hedge leg on the right is where the whole field converges: for every delta-neutral design here, including Kerne's, the perpetual positions live off-chain and you cannot verify them yourself in real time. We say so in Kerne's own row rather than only in the others.
| Protocol | Backing model | How reserves are shown | Reserve leg: check it yourself? | Recompute reserves without an attestor? | Hedge leg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EthenaUSDe / sUSDeVerify it yourself | CeFi-custodied delta-neutral | Transparency dashboard with on-chain custody-wallet links plus weekly third-party Proof of Reserves and monthly signed custodian attestations (Copper, Ceffu, Anchorage, Kraken). Chaos Labs' Edge oracle verifies delta-neutrality weekly, with Chainlink, LlamaRisk and Harris & Trotter feeds alongside. | Partly on-chain | NoChaos Labs + weekly PoR / custodian attestations | Off-chain, attested |
| UsualUSD0 / USD0++ (bUSD0)Verify it yourself | RWA-backed (tokenized T-bills) | Tokenized T-bill and money-market reserves (USYC, M, USTBL) held in Usual contracts and readable on Etherscan, with a Chainlink Proof of Reserve and Price Feed overlay. Each RWA token's par value still rests on its own off-chain fund-administrator attestation (Cohen & Co, PwC). | Partly on-chain | NoChainlink PoR + RWA fund-admin attestation | No hedge (RWA) |
| Falcon FinanceUSDf / sUSDf | CeFi-custodied, overcollateralized + delta-neutral | Daily transparency dashboard with a per-custodian breakdown (Ceffu, Fireblocks, on-chain), backed by weekly ht.digital reserve attestations and quarterly Harris & Trotter ISAE 3000 audits (first published Oct 2025, about $1.96B at roughly 104%). Custodian-sourced aggregates, not enumerated wallets or a re-derivable proof. | Trust an attestor | Noht.digital / Harris & Trotter (ISAE 3000) | Off-chain, attested |
| MidasmTBILL / mBASIS / mEDGE / mHYPER | Tokenized RWA + manager-run strategies | On-chain NAV and Proof of Reserves published by the Midas Attestation Engine (Chainlink Runtime Environment plus LlamaRisk's SAVE framework, with Canary and vLayer verifying and IPFS storage); mTBILL price propagated on-chain by Ankura Trust under fiduciary duty. What you read on-chain is the verified output of a fund-administrator-fed pipeline. | Trust an attestor | NoMidas Attestation Engine (Chainlink + Ankura Trust) | Off-chain, attested |
| AxisUSDx / sUSDx | CeFi-custodied delta-neutral | Reserves and the hedge sit in CeFi custody (Fireblocks, Fordefi) mirrored off-exchange (Copper, Ceffu). Accountable's zero-knowledge Data Verification Network plus Chainlink Proof of Reserves publish an attested value on-chain that you read but cannot re-derive from the underlying accounts. Audited by Zellic. Backed by a $5M round led by Galaxy Ventures (Dec 2025). | Trust an attestor | NoAccountable zk-DVN + Chainlink PoR | Off-chain, attested |
| Anzen FinanceUSDz / sUSDz | RWA-backed (private credit) | USDz is minted 1:1 against on-chain SPCT (readable on-chain), with the underlying off-chain private-credit notes underwritten via Percent (a US broker-dealer) and checked against published eligibility criteria by an unnamed independent verification agent. Solvency is shown on Anzen's own hosted dashboard; no live Chainlink, Chaos or Accountable feed. | Partly on-chain | NoAnzen dashboard + unnamed verification agent | No hedge (RWA) |
| Avant ProtocolavUSD / savUSD | Delta-neutral (multi-chain) | Published Reserve Fund and strategy wallet addresses readable on-chain across several chains, including the on-chain perp venues Lighter and Paradex, overlaid by a portfolio NAV struck weekly by Pennyworks, an independent valuation provider. No real-time signed proof and no Chainlink PoR. | Partly on-chain | Noweekly Pennyworks NAV | Off-chain, attested |
| Noon CapitalUSN / sUSN | Custodied 1:1 + delta-neutral strategies | Real-time Proof of Reserves via the Accountable Data Verification Network, which runs a verification engine inside Noon's perimeter, ingests data from its custodians and exchanges, and publishes zero-knowledge-backed reserve, liability and trading-exposure attestations. Some collateral wallets are visible on Etherscan; the rest you read as an attestation. | Trust an attestor | NoAccountable zk Data Verification Network | Off-chain, attested |
| NeutrlNUSD / sNUSD | Delta-neutral (altcoin OTC) | NUSD is backed by OTC-acquired discounted or locked altcoins, each hedged with an equal short perpetual, plus liquid stablecoin reserves. Transparency runs through Accountable's zero-knowledge Data Verification Network, integrated before launch, which reads balances from custodians, exchanges and contracts and publishes a live Proof of Solvency you read on Neutrl's dashboard, with Hypernative as a real-time monitor and pauser. | Trust an attestor | NoAccountable zk Proof of Solvency | Off-chain, attested |
| Kerne (this site)kUSD / skUSDVerify it yourself | On-chain delta-neutral (Base) | Raw on-chain reserves readable directly from Base, plus an hourly EIP-191-signed Proof of Reserves anyone can re-derive (recover the signer, rehash the payload, check freshness) with a free /verify tool in the browser. No third-party attestor. The off-chain Hyperliquid hedge leg is self-signed only; an independent attestation of that leg is being scoped. | Self-verifiable | YesNo attestor in the path | Off-chain, self-reported |
Each cell is sourced and dated in the Sources section below, cross-verified on June 30, 2026 against each protocol's own documentation, the named attestor, audit firms, and reputable reporting. Categories like "trust an attestor" describe the structure of the verification, not the quality of the protocol. Several of these are large, audited and well-run.
Want to run this exact check on any of these dollars yourself? Paste its contract address into Verify Any Stablecoin to read its live on-chain supply and see, for that token, which part of the backing is self-verifiable on-chain and which part rests on an attestor.
The one column no attestor can copy.
Look down the "recompute reserves without an attestor" column and you see the same answer nine times, then one exception. Every other design on this page, large and small, routes its authoritative reserve figure through a third party you have to trust: HT Digital and Harris & Trotter for Falcon, Accountable for Axis, Noon and Neutrl, Chainlink Proof of Reserves for Usual and inside the Midas Attestation Engine, Chaos Labs for Ethena, a weekly Pennyworks NAV for Avant, a hosted dashboard for Anzen. These are good, often excellent, verifiers. The point is structural, not a knock: in each case the party that actually looks at the accounts is the attestor, not you, and the proof you get is a figure you read rather than one you reproduce.
This is the column competitors cannot simply add, because passing it is a property of the architecture, not of effort or scale. To answer it yes, the reserve has to live on-chain where you can read it raw, and the proof of it has to be signed from public inputs so you can recompute the result yourself. A protocol whose backing sits in off-exchange custody can publish a beautiful zero-knowledge attestation and still answer no, because the underlying accounts were never yours to read. That is why kUSD is the only yes here, and why a peer would have to rebuild on a signed, on-chain, self-recomputable reserve to move its own cell, not just hire another auditor.
It is worth being precise about why this matters now. The institutional default is converging on Chainlink Proof of Reserves as table stakes, and that is a real improvement: a Chainlink PoR feed is a high-integrity, independent signal, and protocols that adopt it are more transparent than those that do not. But a PoR feed is still a value an oracle network publishes after reading custodian and exchange balances you cannot see. It raises the floor of trust; it does not hand you the ability to recompute the reserves with no third party in the path. The distinction this column draws is methodology, not scale or sincerity: read-and-trust versus read-and-re-derive. As more of the field adopts attested PoR, that line is the one that still separates a dollar you can check from a dollar someone checks for you.
And the honest bound, again: this is one column, and it is only the reserve leg. On the hedge leg every delta-neutral dollar here, Kerne included, asks you to trust a reported figure. Kerne wins the column it can earn by construction and ties the field on the one it cannot, and both facts are on this page on purpose.
The honest risk on each.
Verifiable is not the same as safe, and a clean attestation is not the same as no risk. So here is the standing risk on each name, stated as plainly as the method, including Kerne's.
| Protocol | Standing risk |
|---|---|
| EthenaUSDe / sUSDe | The proven, audited incumbent, not a Genesis project. Yield depends on positive perpetual funding; most backing and the entire short hedge sit in off-exchange custody and on CEXs, confirmed by trusted attestation, with custodian and exchange counterparty concentration the core tail risk. |
| UsualUSD0 / USD0++ (bUSD0) | Governance and redemption-term risk: in January 2025 USD0++'s $1 redemption was reset to an $0.87 floor (now bUSD0 at a $0.92 floor maturing June 2028), breaking the peg with no reserve shortfall. Plus RWA credit and attestation dependency on a small set of off-chain tokenizers. |
| Falcon FinanceUSDf / sUSDf | Self-verification rests on trusting the ht.digital and Harris & Trotter attestations. Standing exposures are custodian and CEX concentration, funding-rate risk, mixed volatile collateral, and a recovered July 2025 depeg to about $0.94. The latest Oct 2025 audit shows reserves above liabilities. |
| MidasmTBILL / mBASIS / mEDGE / mHYPER | Off-chain, CeFi-custodied RWA: assets and trading sit with licensed managers, custodians and exchanges, so you trust the attestation pipeline rather than self-custodied on-chain reserves. The basis products (mBASIS, mHYPER) carry funding-rate and CEX counterparty risk on an off-chain hedge. A credible regulated multi-verifier design. |
| AxisUSDx / sUSDx | The classic CeFi delta-neutral stack: funding and basis risk, custody and off-exchange counterparty exposure, and transparency that depends on the Accountable and Chainlink attestation capturing the true off-chain state. Early-stage as of mid-2026, launching on Ethereum and Plasma with headline metrics largely closed-beta after a $5M Galaxy-led raise. |
| Anzen FinanceUSDz / sUSDz | The SPCT 1:1 mirror is on-chain, but the load-bearing reserve value is off-chain private credit that is opaque, illiquid and not re-derivable on-chain. Concentrated portfolio, permissioned mint and redeem, thin liquidity, and a real depeg record (about $0.97 in late June 2026, all-time low $0.82 in March 2025). |
| Avant ProtocolavUSD / savUSD | Off-chain hedge and valuation-trust risk: the short-futures leg runs on unnamed off-chain venues via an external manager (0xPartners), and the authoritative solvency figure is a weekly Pennyworks NAV, so intra-week backing and the full hedge are trusted rather than re-derived on-chain. |
| Noon CapitalUSN / sUSN | USN is backed 1:1 by USDC, USDT and short-term T-bills in custodial wallets plus delta-neutral strategies. Reserve and hedge transparency rests on trusting the Accountable attestation, with custodial, exchange and funding-rate exposure on the off-chain legs. |
| NeutrlNUSD / sNUSD | The load-bearing book is OTC-acquired locked altcoins that are off-chain, illiquid and not re-derivable, so reserve and hedge transparency rests on trusting the Accountable attestation. In February 2026 an access-control flaw in the Pendle Standardized-Yield integration for NUSD (a permissionless internal-balance burn in the SY redeem path) was exploited via a flash loan, draining about $45,900 from NUSD and USDC liquidity providers and the SY reserve. It was a smart-contract bug in an integration, not a shortfall in the OTC backing, and Neutrl has since added Hypernative real-time monitoring. |
| Kerne (this site)kUSD / skUSD | Genesis and pre-audit: small real scale, an external audit scoped but not yet complete, the Hyperliquid hedge leg self-reported rather than user-verifiable and concentrated on one venue, funding-rate risk to a modeled (not yet realized) yield, and a PSM that prices USDC at a hard 1:1 with no depeg oracle on that leg. The reserve leg is genuinely self-verifiable; the rest is named here so you do not find it later. |
The pattern, said once.
The institutional synthetic dollars run on the same off-chain stack: custody at Fireblocks, Ceffu, Copper or Coinbase; hedges on CEX perpetuals; and a reputable verifier, Chaos Labs, Accountable, Harris & Trotter, Chainlink, sitting between you and the accounts, turning what they see into a proof you read. It is a real model with real assurance, and it scales. Its one structural property is that the verifier, not you, is the party that actually looks at the reserves.
Kerne is built the other way around on the leg where it can be. The dollar mints 1:1 from USDC through an on-chain module on Base, so the reserve is something you read off the chain directly, and the hourly Proof of Reserves is signed from public inputs, so you recompute it rather than trust it. On the hedge leg Kerne is in the same position as everyone else: the Hyperliquid short is reported and signed, not independently attested, and we are clear that the signature proves who said it and when, not that the position exists at the claimed size. The difference is not that Kerne removes all trust. It is that Kerne pushes the trust boundary as far toward you as the architecture allows, and tells you exactly where it still sits.
What Kerne still owes.
A scorecard that hid its author's weak spots would be the very thing it warns against. So here they are, plainly, and they are why Kerne's hedge column reads exactly like the rest of the field.
- The hedge leg is self-reported. The on-chain reserve is independently readable. The Hyperliquid hedge equity in the Proof of Reserves is reported by Kerne and bound to a signature, and an independent third-party attestation of that leg is being scoped, not yet live. Until it is, you verify the dollar's backing yourself but take the delta-neutrality on our word plus a signature.
- Single hedge venue. The hedge runs on Hyperliquid alone today. That is venue and counterparty concentration the larger names spread across several exchanges, and it is a real risk at Kerne's scale.
- Pre-audit. Kerne has not completed an external audit. An independent engagement is being finalized and an internal adversarial review is published at /security/findings-tracker. Until that lands, the smart-contract risk is real and undiluted.
- Genesis scale, modeled yield. Kerne is intentionally small, so the published APY is a live model rather than a large realized distribution. It is computed at /api/apy and the live size is at /api/stats. Both are honest numbers; neither is a big one.
- Funding-rate risk. The yield is built from staking plus perpetual funding. A sustained negative-funding regime compresses or erodes it, absorbed at Genesis scale by an insurance fund that is honestly near empty today.
- The USDC-depeg blind spot. The module values USDC at 1:1 by design, so on its own it does not independently price a USDC depeg. We would rather you read that here than in an exploit write-up later.
None of this is hidden, and that is the entire argument. Kerne wins exactly one column on this page, the reserve leg, and it earns it by letting you check rather than asking you to trust. Everywhere it cannot yet do that, it says so.
Check Kerne yourself in sixty seconds.
The claim in Kerne's row is not "trust us." It is "here is the tool." Each of these resolves to something you can open without our permission.
- /verify: paste Kerne's signed Proof of Reserves, or any signed attestation, and recover the signer, rehash the payload and check freshness entirely in your own browser. No keys, no backend.
- /api/por/signed: the hourly signed Proof of Reserves itself, with on-chain assets, the reported hedge equity, the solvency ratio and a signature you can check against the published signer.
- /transparency: the live backing and the source-verified contracts on Base.
- /resolv-vs-kerne: the three on-chain commands that check the mint path, the exact class of failure that drained Resolv.
Next steps.
If a synthetic dollar whose reserves you can verify yourself on Base is what you are after, the next step is to hold the dollar you can check.
Want to be the one a reader can check?
The same signed Proof of Reserves Kerne runs over its own backing every hour is available as a one-time statement for your protocol: cryptographically signed, point-in-time, and verifiable by your counterparties in about three lines, without trusting you. Built for a raise, a listing, or partner diligence. Attestation tooling, not an audit. One fixed fee, delivered in days.
Dispute a rating, or get re-rated.
This is a maintained, dated ranking, not a one-off. It is refreshed as protocols change how they show their reserves, and every cell is sourced in the section below. If you run one of the protocols on this page and think your cell is wrong, we want to hear it, and the bar is the same for everyone and public.
If a cell is factually wrong
If an attestor is misnamed, a method has changed, or a detail is stale, send us the on-chain address or the documentation link and we will correct it quickly and note the correction date. We would rather be accurate than first.
If you want to move your recompute cell to yes
The recipe is the same one Kerne had to meet, and it is architectural, not a new auditor: publish raw on-chain reserves a holder can read directly, plus a proof they can re-derive from public inputs with no third party in the path. Ship that and point us at the live surface; we will re-read it and update the cell from your endpoints, not from a claim.
One thing we will not do is publish a quality, safety, or solvency judgment. Every protocol here is named on one structural axis only, attestor-optional versus attestor-required, and that is a fact about the architecture, not a verdict on the team. If you believe a cell is unfair rather than inaccurate, tell us and we will review it against the sourced material in the open.
Sources.
Each protocol's transparency method is drawn from its own documentation and the named verifier, cross-verified on June 30, 2026. Each protocol's current state is best sourced from its own canonical site; the structural method is evergreen, the snapshot framing ages.
- Ethena (USDe / sUSDe): the Ethena transparency dashboard (app.ethena.fi), Chaos Labs' Edge Proof of Reserves writeup, CoinDesk on the Coinbase custody and distribution deal (June 2026), and the Ethena docs on the Reserve Fund.
- Usual (USD0 / USD0++ / bUSD0): the Usual docs, Usual's "Chainlink Standard" post (Jan 2025), and The Block, Gate and OneSafe on the January 2025 USD0++ redemption-terms repricing.
- Falcon Finance (USDf / sUSDf): Falcon's ht.digital appointment and transparency-dashboard posts, the BKR note on Harris & Trotter, PR Newswire on the Oct 2025 ISAE 3000 audit, and The Defiant and Cointelegraph on the recovered July 2025 depeg.
- Midas (mTBILL / mBASIS / mEDGE / mHYPER): the Midas transparency page and docs, reporting on the Chainlink-powered Attestation Engine, and The Block on the licensed risk managers.
- Axis (USDx / sUSDx): The Block and The Cryptonomist on the Galaxy-led raise and the Veda, Accountable, Chainlink and Zellic stack, the Axis security page, and Accountable's own Data Verification Network writeups.
- Anzen Finance (USDz / sUSDz): the Anzen docs (eligibility, transparency, audits), RWA.xyz and CoinGecko for supply and price history, and the Chainlink ecosystem page.
- Avant Protocol (avUSD / savUSD): the Avant docs (reserve fund, strategy addresses, audits), Pennyworks, and DeFiLlama.
- Noon Capital (USN / sUSN): the Noon docs (transparency, our stablecoin) and Accountable's "Live Proof of Reserves" post (Jan 2025).
- Neutrl (NUSD / sNUSD): the Neutrl docs (NUSD backing and FAQ) and Accountable's Neutrl Proof of Solvency writeup for the transparency method, the Hypernative writeup on Neutrl's on-chain settlement and monitor/pauser role, and the DarkNavy and SmartContractsHacking incident analyses plus CryptoTimes for the February 2026 Pendle Standardized-Yield integration exploit (about $45.9k) and the separate March 2026 DNS hijack.
- Kerne (kUSD / skUSD): resolves to live endpoints rather than reporting, at /api/por/signed, /api/risk-status, /api/apy and /api/stats, the in-browser /verify tool, and the kUSD contract on Base at 0x5C2EfdF0D8D286959b42308966bc2B97f5680AA3.
Related reading: why the synthetic dollars that collapsed all failed in the same place, kUSD vs USDe, the Resolv mint-path comparison, why a verifier you do not control is a single point of failure, and the essay Who actually verifies the synthetic dollars.
Page last updated: June 30, 2026. Transparency methods are structural and evergreen; each protocol's current state ages, so verify at the canonical sites linked above. Kerne is not affiliated with Ethena Labs, Usual, Falcon Finance, Midas, Axis, Anzen, Avant, Noon, Neutrl, KernelDAO, Kelp DAO, Kernel Protocol, Chaos Labs, Accountable, Harris & Trotter, Chainlink, Hypernative, or any other named party. Nothing here is financial advice.