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When I talk to Solana ecosystem people, I’ll sometimes ask what new projects they’ve been hearing about. One such project that’s been catching apparent buzz is Perena, a stablecoin infrastructure protocol.
Perena is built on the premise that as stablecoins proliferate, liquidity could fragment, and stablecoins aren’t useful if they aren’t liquid. The platform offers a Solana-based stablecoin liquidity pool, and it plans to offer an asset-backed stablecoin in the future.
The project was founded by Anna Yuan, who started the Solana Foundation’s stablecoin arm during her more than two years at the non-profit. While working at the foundation, Yuan began to see that new stablecoin issuers would mint a lot of tokens but would have limited integrations, and users consequently weren’t able to benefit from stablecoins in the real world.
She cited Ondo as an example — the tokenized US Treasury stablecoin has over $100 million in supply but only 3,500 holders, according to SolScan.
I asked Yuan about the commonly cited claim in crypto that stablecoins have pulled off the difficult task of finding product-market fit, or satisfying the needs of an existing market.
“I don’t agree,” Yuan said, adding that liquidity begets PMF, and most stablecoins simply aren’t liquid enough to be useful. She added that the real-world need for things like money transfers in emerging markets will help stablecoins “get there.”
Perena is currently in closed beta, but the platform’s main feature will initially be a multi-stablecoin liquidity pool which uses a liquidity provider token called USD* that represents a piece of a seed pool containing Tether, Circle, and PayPal USD. In simpler terms, the liquidity pool model should make it easier to issue stablecoins, since smaller coins can access the liquidity from the well-capitalized seed pool.
The concept has raised to-be-announced seed funds, and Yuan’s deep links in Solana helped her tap into the ecosystem’s very-active angel investor community. Yuan said she decided to start raising funds on a Thursday, and by late Friday, she already had a couple dozen angel investors on board. Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal are both noteworthy backers.
At the end of our call, Yuan and I got chatting about how Solana’s stablecoin market capitalization can meaningfully grow. The network currently accounts for just 2% of all stables, according to DeFiLlama.
Yuan gave an interesting answer: Solana PayFi could grow the economy for people taking their paycheck in stablecoins. She estimated 2,000 people currently take their full-time salary in Solana stablecoins. That number could certainly get a lot bigger.
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