Perena

Perena is a Solana-native stablecoin infrastructure protocol that provides unified liquidity and yield-bearing savings across multiple stablecoins. Where most DeFi protocols compete with individual stablecoin issuers, Perena positions itself as a neutral foundational layer — shared plumbing for the growing number of stablecoins launching on Solana. Rather than issuing its own stablecoin to rival USDC or PYUSD, Perena builds the swap and savings rails through which all of those stablecoins can achieve deeper on-chain liquidity and utility.

The protocol was founded by Anna Yuan, who previously led stablecoin initiatives at the Solana Foundation, where she helped grow Solana's stablecoin ecosystem to $3.6 billion in issuance. Her team includes professionals with backgrounds at Jump Trading, and the project drew early support from Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal. Perena launched on Solana mainnet on December 3, 2024, and currently operates in open beta.

The Numéraire AMM

Perena's core infrastructure product is Numéraire, an automated market maker designed specifically for stablecoin trading. Traditional bilateral liquidity pools require each stablecoin pair to maintain its own isolated reserve of capital, fragmenting liquidity across dozens of pools. Numéraire solves this with a hub-and-spoke model: USD* — Perena's own yield-bearing token — sits at the center, and all supported stablecoins route through it rather than trading directly against each other. A USDC-to-USDT swap, for example, routes USDC → USD* → USDT. Concentrating liquidity in one hub improves execution quality for traders and capital efficiency for liquidity providers.

At launch, Numéraire supported swaps across seven stablecoins including USDC, USDT, and PYUSD. The protocol's on-chain program address is NUMERUNsFCP3kuNmWZuXtm1AaQCPj9uw6Guv2Ekoi5P.

USD Star

USD* is Perena's flagship end-user product: a liquid savings stablecoin. Users deposit supported stablecoins (USDC, USDT, or PYUSD) and receive USD* in return. Unlike conventional stablecoins with fixed 1:1 pegs, USD* reflects the Net Asset Value of its underlying asset pool — it appreciates in value over time as yield accrues, rather than distributing rewards as separate token emissions. There are no staking requirements, no lockups, and no manual reward claims. Users can redeem USD* for supported stablecoins at any time.

Yield is generated from two primary sources. Approximately 80% of pooled capital is deployed into delta-neutral strategies that capture funding rates and basis spreads without directional market exposure. The remaining 20% goes into over-collateralized on-chain lending markets. Tokenized real-world assets provide additional yield diversification. As of mid-2025, USD* was generating approximately 10.4% APY, with a longer-term expected range of 10-15% annually. Some partner integrations — such as RateX liquidity pools — have delivered higher returns, though with additional risk layers.

Perena describes this model as a "stablebank": a structure combining stablecoin-based savings, automated yield generation, and liquidity management without the friction of traditional staking or lockup protocols. The team publicly emphasizes concentration risk management — USD* is designed so no single counterparty or strategy failure can take down the entire system. Capital is allocated across multiple counterparties and strategies, with regular public transparency on portfolio composition.

Vaults and Institutional Products

Beyond USD*, Perena offers Vaults — optional, strategy-specific investment products that allow users to deploy stable assets into predefined yield strategies with different risk and return profiles than the base USD* allocation.

Perena is also developing USD Prime (USD'), a separate product aimed at institutional and regulated use cases. USD' targets full 1:1 U.S. dollar collateralization, suited for payment and settlement counterparties that require complete fiat backing rather than a yield-generating position. This positions Perena to serve both retail DeFi users through USD* and institutional participants through USD' from the same underlying infrastructure.

In August 2026, Perena teased an upcoming SOL yield product alongside a new partner integration, signaling an expansion beyond the stablecoin-only positioning.

Traction and Metrics

Since its December 2024 launch, Perena accumulated approximately $1.98 billion in total swap volume across 3.06 million swaps by July 2025. TVL peaked at approximately $24.7 million in April 2025, with Numéraire holding around $23 million in TVL as of mid-July 2025.

Funding and Backers

Perena raised approximately $3 million in a pre-seed round in December 2024, led by Borderless Capital. Investors in that round included Binance Labs (now YZi Labs), Maelstrom, MitonC, ABCDE Capital, SevenX Ventures, Anagram, Primitive Ventures, Breed VC, Graph Ventures, Temporal, and Pivot Global. Binance Labs cited its participation as supporting "the establishment of the first stablecoin infrastructure protocol on Solana." Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal also participated as backers.

In July 2025, Perena closed an additional undisclosed venture round with participation from Hermeneutic Investments, Susquehanna Capital, and Crypto Native Capital.

Points and Token Outlook

Perena operates a pre-TGE points program called Petals. Users earn Petals by depositing into USD* and participating in the protocol. An eventual token generation event has been anticipated by the community, though no official date has been confirmed publicly as of mid-2026.

Ecosystem Position

Perena's founding thesis is that the proliferation of stablecoin issuers on Solana creates a coordination problem: as more companies launch stablecoins, each faces an uphill battle for liquidity and adoption in isolation. As Anna Yuan described at the project's launch, "If PayPal, Robinhood and 20 other companies want to launch stablecoins on Solana, they're going to have a really hard time getting any adoption." Perena's answer is to serve as a neutral party that does not compete with any of them but instead provides the shared infrastructure — swaps, savings, and settlement rails — on which all of them can build. Its backing from across the Solana ecosystem, including the network's own co-founders, reflects how that positioning has been received.