Solana Foundation’s former stablecoin lead Anna Yuan has left the mothership to build her own startup catering to the fast-growing crypto subsector.
The company building Perena, a stablecoin trading infrastructure project, raised “around $3 million” in a pre-seed funding round led by Borderless Capital, Yuan told CoinDesk in an interview last month.
Perena isn’t solely focused on launching another stablecoin. Instead, it’s creating on-chain systems that allow the seemingly endless droves of other stablecoin newcomers to have good trading liquidity, even in nascency.
That’s the funny thing about stablecoins. While their exact backing recipes may slightly differ, most every stablecoin gets its value from essentially the same source: the U.S. dollar, the globally-recognized reserve currency. When dozens of fintech companies all have, essentially, their own digital version of the dollar, how will consumers, businesses, traders – anyone – move seamlessly between them?
“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, and those stablecoins are going to be any more usable than their fiat counterparts,” she said.
“We want to be the foundational layer – the neutral party that supports stablecoin issuers.”
The whole project is a bet that stablecoins will continue to grow in prominence – not only as a critical asset for traders speculating on cryptos, but as a store of value and medium of exchange, or, in other words, as money.
Yuan thinks that Solana’s fast speeds and cheap fees can be a catalyst for yet more people to experiment with bringing more of their money on-chain via stablecoins. It helps that so many crypto jobs are paying staff with stablecoins. Payroll introduces people to the on-chain economy, and they aren’t always so eager to offboard entirely.
Perena fits into this puzzle as a place of exchange. It is setting up swap pools that allow traders of up to seven different stablecoins to readily swap between assets – much like Curve’s 3pool does on Ethereum. Yuan said stablecoin holders will be able to earn extra yield by lending their assets into the pool, earning more based on their risk tolerance.
Along the pool infrastructure, Perena plans to build a form of “synthetic money” that according to Yuan will be more resilient than the fiat currencies most people hold in their traditional bank accounts.
This will take the form of a “collateralized debt position” (CDP) stablecoin backed by other stablecoins – much like MakerDAO (now Sky) did with DAI. Perena hasn’t finalized its design just yet but Yuan is hopeful that building a CDP next to a stableswap will create more “synergies.”