Who runs Kerne.

The person who answers.

Liam Lakevold is a co-founder of Kerne and the person who replies to this site, scopes the work, and signs. If you write to a Kerne address about an engagement, a finding, or a deposit, he is who answers.

Correspondence hygiene, because it looks like a mismatch otherwise: you write to liam@kerne.fi, which forwards and is not a sending address, and the reply arrives from kerne.systems@protonmail.com. Same operator. Automated notices come from watch@kerne.fi. Anything about Kerne arriving from any other address is not us.

There is no company, and we would rather you learn that here.

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 is a services agreement with the founders personally, and no governing law is asserted. That is set out in full in our terms, and it is deliberately not buried: if your mandate requires an incorporated counterparty in a named jurisdiction, Kerne does not meet it, and you should find that out here rather than three calls in.

What that does not mean is that you are stuck with a personal counterparty forever. Engagements carry a novation clause: if a Kerne entity is ever incorporated, the agreement transfers to it on the same terms, with your consent given in advance in the agreement itself. Personal execution is not improvised for the occasion either. The external security audit was contracted the same way, with him signing as an individual and no entity anywhere in the document, and the firm accepted it.

Because there is no entity, there are no employees, and this page publishes no headcount. Kerne is a small founding team. What is worth checking is not how many people there are but what any one of them can do alone, and that is on chain: protocol administration is a 2-of-3 Safe on Base at 0x52d3E450bA6c299B1B07298F1E87DD74732D4877, so no single signer moves anything. The other two signers are founders whose names are theirs to publish rather than ours.

Check that, because the obvious check looks bad: two of the three owners have never sent a transaction. Safe signatures are made off chain, so an owner's own transaction count measures nothing. Every signature each of them has made is recovered from chain, with what it does and does not prove, at the Safe queue page. Two of the three are also a quorum, so the threshold does not require the founder named above.

Who else has looked.

The external security audit was carried out by Hexens, and the report is published in full, including the findings that were not flattering, at /security/audits. Kerne pays for outside review rather than claiming an in-house security function it does not have.

What this page does not claim.

No headcount, because there is no entity to be employed by. No titles beyond founder. No advisory board, no institutional backers, and no governing law. If any of those appear on this page in future it will be because they became true and are checkable, and the date below will have moved.