Stabledash Live · · 26 min

Perena on Solana: USD*, Tranched Yield and What Onchain Wealth Management Looks Like

With Anna Yuan

Key takeaways

  • Anna Yuan says Perena has over 10,000 users and has grown only by selling directly to end customers.

  • USD* has been live since last September, and Yuan says it has returned over 10% since inception and paid out over $1,000,000 in yield.

  • USD* Junior and USD* Protected sit on top of the same underlying pool, and Yuan says Junior absorbed about $22,000 in losses tied to Drift.

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Summary

Founder Anna Yuan describes how Perena packages yield into tranched onchain products sold directly to end customers, and the regulatory questions vaults now face.

Perena has over 10,000 users in its yield products, founder Anna Yuan said in an interview. She described the company as a wealth product rather than payments plumbing: "the Agoras of the world and the CoinFlows of the world are making money move," she said, while Perena works on making money grow.

Track record of USD*

Anna Yuan said USD*, the company's second product, has been live since last September, has generated over 10% returns since inception and has paid out over $1,000,000 in yield. She said it updates its NAV twenty four seven in real time, which she said most traditional asset managers are not used to.

“ETFs and REITs and similar to REIT structure, like, trust structures that are traded on exchanges were, like, last century's attempt at making these things more liquid, more tradable, etcetera. This century's attempt is, like, the whole tokenization because it's even more flexible than ETFs and REITs.”
Anna Yuan

Tranches for risk preference

A month ago, Perena added USD* Junior, which offers amplified yield, and USD* Protected, which offers principal protection, both on the same underlying pool. Yuan said Protected has a cap of 1,000,000 and called it "the most low risk product on our site." She said the roughly $22,000 hit from Drift came out of the Junior tranche.

Anna Yuan said Perena keeps sub 10% exposure to onchain lending to provide redemption liquidity, and might move to secondary liquidity from real-world asset tokens such as Figure's HELOC prime token or a HUMA PST token. She also said the company lost $3,000 or $2,000 from a secondary effect of exploits on Solana.

Selling direct

Anna Yuan said Perena has never done a TBL deal and always grows directly with end customers. A program called Perena Purple, for depositors of over 100 k, gets weekly market updates and biweekly portfolio updates. She said owning more of the consumer stack would give users a better experience.

Funds or not

Yuan said vaults face "high cognitive dissonance": asked by a regulator whether USD* is a fund, she has to say no. She is looking at both making part of the product a regulated onchain fund and using legal structuring. She called tokenization this century's more flexible successor to ETFs and REITs, and named emerging market quant funds as strategies she would like to bring onchain.

Taken together, Anna Yuan presents Perena as a direct-to-consumer wealth manager that relies on tranching, transparency and permissionless access. She named building with stablecoins, permissionless access and transparency as the values that have held through its pivots, while the question of how vaults will be regulated is still open.

Drift, Figure, Camino, and Solana Foundation come up most.

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