Tear Sheet
Kerne Protocol
A delta-neutral basis strategy on Base. WETH and liquid-staking collateral held on-chain, designed to be hedged with a short perpetual on Hyperliquid to capture funding-rate carry. Every figure below is read live from public endpoints, not hand-entered.
Live metrics
Composition: 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.
Updated on load and every 5 minutes from the same JSON any visitor can pull. The PSM backing ratio renders only when the hourly signed Proof-of-Reserve cryptographically verifies; otherwise it shows as unverified rather than a number you must trust.
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.
Reachable exit depth, per contract and read live, is published on /transparency alongside every redemption that has actually executed on chain.
Strategy
- Type: delta-neutral basis (funding-rate carry).
- Collateral: WETH and liquid-staking tokens, held on-chain in an ERC-4626 vault.
- Hedge: short perpetual on Hyperliquid, sized to keep net delta near zero.
- Yield source: perp funding plus staking yield, net of hedging and insurance costs.
- kUSD: a 1:1 USDC-backed unit minted through the PSM. skUSD: the yield-bearing stake.
Key facts
- Chain: Base (chainId 8453).
- Admin: kUSD and all three PSM modules are administered by a TimelockController with a 48 hour delay at 0x36A14976980B7Dd33136f6613545EB0A2C0a0D72, which took over from the 2-of-3 Gnosis Safe on 2026-08-06; the Safe remains that timelock's proposer, executor and canceller, and can still pause any module instantly through a separate guardian contract. The WETH vault and the skUSD staking vault are still administered by the Safe directly with no delay, and skUSD holds most of the kUSD in existence, so the accurate summary is that mint and redeem admin is behind a delay and the staking vault is not. No single deployer key holds admin on any of them. The redeployed skUSD vault added the Safe as co-admin and the bot as strategist on 2026-07-08, and on 2026-08-02 the deployer Trezor renounced both roles irreversibly, so the Safe is its sole admin today (see skUSD admin status).
- Proof-of-Reserve: hourly, EOA-signed, third-party-reproducible, at /api/por/signed.
- Source: live mint-path contracts verified on BaseScan and Sourcify.
- Audit: one completed external audit; Hexens fieldwork ran from July 13, 2026 and the final report published on July 31, 2026, ten findings, none critical, eight fixed and two acknowledged, published in full. The deployed vault runs earlier bytecode than the reviewed commit (see below).
Verified contracts
The live money-path contracts are source-verified, so anyone can read the exact deployed code. Full registry and the bytecode-reconstruction evidence for older contracts is at /transparency/source-audit.
| Contract | Address | Role |
|---|---|---|
| KerneVault v2 (live) | 0x8ccc…292B | Deposit / mint vault |
| KUSDPSM (live) | 0xaBDE…9803 | USDC to kUSD peg module |
| kUSD | 0x5C2E…0AA3 | USDC-backed stable unit |
| skUSD | 0x96F5…fA14 | Yield-bearing staked kUSD |
| Governance Safe | 0x52d3…4877 | 2-of-3 multisig, admin |
Disclosures
- One external audit, and the deployed vault is not the audited build. An internal adversarial security review and its findings are published at /security/findings-tracker; Hexens fieldwork ran from July 13, 2026 and the final report published on July 31, 2026, readable in full.
- Off-chain leg. The Hyperliquid hedge equity in the Proof-of-Reserve is reported by Kerne and bound to a signature; on-chain balances are independently readable by anyone. An independent third-party attestation of the off-chain leg is being scoped.
- Not advice. This factsheet is informational. It is not an offer, solicitation, audit, solvency guarantee, or financial, legal, or tax advice. Yields are variable and not guaranteed.