kUSD is minted 1:1 from USDC through an on-chain Peg Stability Module on Base, at a size-tiered fee that steps down as the mint gets larger, and it stays redeemable for USDC out of the on-chain PSM reserves. Staking it into skUSD, an ERC-4626 wrapper, is designed to pay a delta-neutral yield built from Ethereum staking rewards plus perpetual-futures funding. This is the product, and it is the majority of what Kerne is.
Size today: Live and small. Reserves, the backing ratio and the redeemable depth are at /api/por, with an hourly signed statement at /api/por/signed. The rate lives at /api/apy, which publishes the forward model and the realized figure side by side. No rate is printed on this page on purpose.
An equal-sized short against the staked collateral, so the yield is the spread between staking and funding rather than a bet on price.
Size today: Live as topology, negligible as a book. It runs at pilot scale against a small disclosed founder float, its venue leverage is transmitted before every order, and the only distribution ever made was a 0.1 kUSD plumbing test on 9 July 2026. It is not deprecated and it is not large.
Three
We sell the verification.
The reserve checks we built to keep ourselves honest are sold as fixed-scope services: a free public grader for any token, signed reads of a single address, commissioned reserve teardowns, point-in-time signed proof-of-reserve statements, peg and reserve monitoring, an adversarial pre-audit sweep, a fixed-scope treasury read, and the synthetic-dollar stack deployed and operated on someone else's chain. Attestation and objective-data tooling, not audits and not solvency opinions.
Size today: Live and priced in public. The whole catalogue, from the free tool to the full stack, is on one page at /pricing. This is the part of Kerne that has a price list.
Four
We publish the measurement.
The Honesty Index computes what 21 synthetic and yield-bearing dollars advertise against what their holders actually realized, read from ERC-4626 share-price growth on chain rather than from anybody's marketing. It ranks Kerne last on its own measure, which is the only reason the rest of it is worth reading.
Size today: Live, signed, hourly, 21 rows, at /honesty-index and as JSON at /api/honesty-index. Kerne is listed first by rule and currently carries the widest gap on the board.
What Kerne is not.
Not a curator. We curate no vault, run no vault for anyone else, and manage no third-party capital. On 9 August 2026 we deployed an isolated lending market for kUSD on Euler. It is ungoverned by construction: the factory sets the governor to the zero address inside the same transaction that creates the vaults, so no supply cap, borrow cap or parameter can ever be set on it by anyone, us included. A deployed market is not a curated one and we would rather say so than trade on the confusion. What is actually in it is a live read at /api/euler, not a sentence on this page.
Not an auditor. We sell verification of reserves, which is a read of public state, not an opinion on code or on solvency. Kerne itself has had one external audit: Hexens, final report published 31 July 2026, ten findings, none critical, published unedited at /security/hexens-2026.
Not selling enforcement as revenue. Liquidation and pre-liquidation work is in build, and it is measured before it is claimed. What we measured and then declined, with the number that decided each one, is at /refused.
Not finished. The live vault runs earlier bytecode than the reviewed commit and takes no deposits until that is fixed, the realized yield is far below the advertised rate, and the risk framework has its shape written and its constants deliberately blank. Where the checkable part stops, our disclosures say so.
The same answer, machine-readable.
The statement above also exists in structured form, so an agent describing Kerne and a person reading Kerne get the same company: facts.json, llms.txt and llms-full.txt. If any of the four carries a different identity from the other three, that is a defect in Kerne, not a nuance.
Which kUSD is ours.
Ours is 0x5C2EfdF0D8D286959b42308966bc2B97f5680AA3 on Base, 18 decimals, and nothing else. The ticker does not settle this: a separate token issued by Bankcoin Capital also reports kUSD on Base, and two more share it on Ethereum and BNB Chain. The address is the answer, and the three of them are laid out at /which-kusd-on-base.
