kerne-protocol/honesty-index

The Kerne Honesty Index

What each synthetic dollar advertises, next to what it actually paid.

Advertised APY versus realized APY for 15 synthetic dollar vaults, recomputed hourly from ERC-4626 share price growth on chain, and signed.

The realized column is not taken from anybody's dashboard. It is measured directly from the vault contract: convertToAssets(10**decimals) read at two block heights, divided by 10**asset_decimals, annualized over the real elapsed time between those two blocks. Every row is reproducible by anyone with an archive RPC endpoint and the block numbers in this file.

• Live feed (free, ungated, CORS open): https://kerne.fi/api/honesty-index
• Rendered board: https://kerne.fi/honesty-index
• Methodology: https://kerne.fi/honesty-index#methodology
• Snapshot in this release: 2026-08-06T06:37:17.564Z

Why this exists

A protocol's advertised rate and the rate its holders actually received are different numbers, and almost nobody publishes both. This dataset publishes both, for a category where the difference is material, on one fixed method applied identically to every row including the publisher's own.

Kerne Protocol builds and operates this index and is also row kerne-skusd in it, measured on exactly the same terms as everyone else. In this snapshot Kerne is the worst row on this board on both axes, delivery ratio and absolute gap. That is not a disclaimer bolted onto the bottom of a marketing page: the flags behind that sentence are computed from the data on every build, so the claim changes by itself when the fact does.

The board in this snapshot

Gap is advertised minus realized, in percentage points, so a positive gap is a shortfall. Delivery is realized as a percentage of advertised, so 100 means a protocol paid exactly what it said.

Protocol	Vault	Chain	Status	Comparability	Gap (pp)	Delivery (%)
Kerne	skUSD	base	live	direct	3.09	3.7
Aegis	sYUSD	ethereum	live	direct	0.13	97.6
Avant	savUSD	avalanche	live	direct	0.51	94.4
Cap	stcUSD	ethereum	live	different-window	(not stated)	(not stated)
Ethena	sUSDe	ethereum	live	direct	-0.07	101.7
Falcon Finance	sUSDf	ethereum	live	different-window	(not stated)	(not stated)
Neutrl	sNUSD	ethereum	live	direct	0.03	99.3
Noon	sUSN	ethereum	live	direct	0.56	93.5
Sky	sUSDS	ethereum	live	direct	-0.04	101.2
Tori	strUSD	ethereum	live	different-window	(not stated)	(not stated)
Usual	sUSD0	ethereum	live	context-only	(not stated)	(not stated)
Stables Labs	sUSDX	ethereum	dormant	context-only	(not stated)	(not stated)
Resolv	wstUSR	ethereum	recovery	context-only	(not stated)	(not stated)
Elixir	sdeUSD	ethereum	wind-down	context-only	(not stated)	(not stated)
Level	slvlUSD	ethereum	wind-down	context-only	(not stated)	(not stated)

Of 15 rows, 7 state a gap, 3 publish a figure this dataset declines to compare, and 5 publish no yield figure at all.

The most important rule in this dataset: a blank is not a zero

gap_pp and the delivery ratio are empty, never zero, wherever the method is not entitled to state one. A zero would read as "advertised and realized agree exactly" about a company that simply publishes on a different window, which is the single most damaging thing this file could assert about a named third party.

A gap is stated only when the advertised figure is directly comparable to a 30 day realized window:

advertised_basis	comparability	Gap stated?
modeled	direct	yes
trailing-30d	direct	yes
spot	direct	yes, a governance set spot rate is stable over the window
trailing-7d	different-window	no, both figures are shown and no gap is manufactured
inception-to-date	context-only	no, a since inception average is not what a holder earns today
(nothing published)	context-only	no

Several protocols publish more than one figure. The picker takes the comparable one, not the largest and not the most flattering. Ranking this board by each protocol's highest advertised number produces a different and wrong ordering, and the comparability column is here so that a consumer cannot reproduce that mistake by accident.

Delivery is gated on the identical rule: where no gap may be stated, no ratio is published either.

Files

Path	Rows	What it is
data/current.csv	15	The board at snapshot time, one line per vault, 37 columns.
data/history.csv	1920	The realized series, one line per vault per hourly read, 6 columns.
snapshot/honesty-index-api-response.json	-	The signed snapshot, so the signature can be checked against these exact bytes.
verify.py	-	Independent verification: recomputes the attestation hash, recovers the signer, and cross checks the CSV.

data/current.csv columns

key, protocol, symbol, chain, vault_address, status, advertised_pct, advertised_label, advertised_basis, advertised_captured_at, advertised_source_url, advertised_verbatim, comparability, gap_pp, realized_ok, realized_apy_pct, realized_reason, share_price_from, share_price_to, share_price_growth_pct, from_block, to_block, from_ts_utc, to_ts_utc, elapsed_seconds, realized_window_days, window_clamped, total_assets, total_supply, asset_symbol, is_kerne, permalink, badge_svg, snapshot_generated_at, snapshot_window_days, snapshot_signer, snapshot_attestation_hash

Column order is frozen. New columns are appended at the end and existing ones are never moved or renamed, because somebody will index by position no matter how loudly a README says not to.

data/history.csv columns

read_at_utc, read_at_unix, row_key, protocol, symbol, realized_apy_pct

The series in this release runs 2026-08-01T00:37:16.000Z to 2026-08-06T06:37:17.000Z: 1920 entries across 128 hourly reads. One entry is one vault in one read, so entries are not hours and this file is not as deep as its line count suggests. An earlier archive of the same series exists, predates a storage migration, and is not in this release; it will be merged when it becomes readable again. Nothing here should be read as a claim to depth this file does not have.

Provenance of every column

Realized figures (realized_apy_pct, share_price_from, share_price_to, from_block, to_block, total_assets, total_supply): read directly from the vault contract at the two block heights named in the row, over public archive RPC. Reproducible by anyone. This is the column this project exists to produce.

Advertised figures (advertised_pct, advertised_label, advertised_basis, advertised_captured_at, advertised_source_url, advertised_verbatim): read off the public surface named in advertised_source_url on the date in advertised_captured_at. In most rows that surface is the issuer's own site, app or public API; where it is not, it is the public data endpoint that the issuer's own information site is itself built on, and the URL says so plainly rather than being laundered into a claim that the issuer published it directly. advertised_verbatim carries the short factual snippet exactly as that surface rendered it, so a reader can check that the figure was not paraphrased into something the issuer never said. Where an issuer publishes no figure the field is empty and no figure is invented.

Advertised figures are captured periodically, not hourly, so advertised_captured_at will normally be older than snapshot_generated_at. Both dates are in every row, so the lag is visible rather than hidden.

Status (live, recovery, wind-down, dormant): wind-down is used only where the issuer itself announced one. dormant exists precisely so that a vault whose accrual has stopped with nothing announced is not labelled with a decision its issuer never made. Read the delivery ratio beside this column: a protocol in an announced wind down paying nothing is behaving correctly.

Verification

Each snapshot is signed. attestation_hash is "0x" + sha256(utf8(signed_payload_canonical)) and signature is an EIP-191 personal_sign over the raw 32 bytes of that hash.

• Signing key (public address): 0x84949170e0ad0f9bd8686a4aa4922c10f5fdc4ea
• This snapshot's attestation hash: 0x8dd0acfe0f16647ebd0bf3feedf312f8eb8a3d32da6fbd2aec925f477d54a0b1

Hash the published signed_payload_canonical string bytes. Do not re-serialize the JSON: any re-serialization changes key order or spacing and the hash will not match. That is the check working, not a bug. Run verify.py in this repo to check the hash, the recovered signer, and that the CSV describes the same snapshot as the JSON.

The signature covers the snapshot rows. Any delivery and cite blocks served by the live API sit outside the signed payload on purpose, because they are arithmetic on numbers already inside it and must not appear to be attested by the signature.

Update cadence, and which copy wins

The upstream collector runs hourly and writes a fresh signed snapshot. window_days is 30.

This copy is a lagging mirror and is refreshed on a schedule. When it disagrees with https://kerne.fi/api/honesty-index, which is always current, free and needs no key, the live endpoint is correct and this file is stale. Check generated_at in snapshot/honesty-index-api-response.json before using this copy for anything time sensitive, and cite the live endpoint rather than this mirror.

Limits, stated plainly

• The roster is not the category. It covers vaults that are readable ERC-4626 contracts on chains this collector supports. Protocols that are not ERC-4626, or that live on chains not yet wired up, are absent, and absence is not a judgment. The full coverage limits are published on the rendered board: https://kerne.fi/honesty-index#methodology
• A 30 day realized window is a choice. Long enough to survive a bad day, short enough to describe the present. It is not the only defensible window, and it is why the trailing-7d publishers get no gap here.
• This is a measurement, not a rating and not a grade. There are deliberately no letters, no scores and no rankings of companies in this file. A low delivery ratio is not by itself evidence of dishonesty; read it beside status.
• Not investment advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, hold or redeem anything.

Licence and attribution

The compilation, the schema, and every figure Kerne computed (the realized columns and everything derived from them) are released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Attribute to The Kerne Honesty Index, Kerne Protocol, with a link to https://kerne.fi/honesty-index.

Two carve outs, stated so that reuse is safe:

1. advertised_verbatim is quotation, not Kerne's work. Each value is a short factual snippet reproduced from the third party surface named in advertised_source_url, so that a reader can verify the advertised figure is reported accurately. Kerne asserts no ownership of those snippets and grants no rights in them. They are factual matter, quoted with attribution and a date, and each is a handful of words.
2. Protocol names, token symbols and marks belong to their owners. They appear here as nominative references identifying the product being measured. Their presence is neither an endorsement by them of this dataset nor a claim by Kerne of any affiliation.

If you are one of the issuers listed and something in your row is wrong, the correction path is public and the row will be fixed: https://kerne.fi/honesty-index

Citation

@misc{kerne_honesty_index,
  title  = {The Kerne Honesty Index: advertised versus realized APY for synthetic dollars},
  author = {{Kerne Protocol}},
  year   = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/kerne-protocol/honesty-index}},
  note   = {Snapshot 2026-08-06T06:37:17.564Z, attestation 0x8dd0acfe0f16647ebd0bf3feedf312f8eb8a3d32da6fbd2aec925f477d54a0b1}
}