Save smarter.
Be the house.

Abstract

Pesalo is a mobile money app built on Stellar. It looks like the simplest savings account you have ever used: sign in with Face ID, deposit dollars (USDC), and earn 7%+ APY — fixed, not variable, locked the moment you deposit. No seed phrases, no DeFi vocabulary, no blockchain visible anywhere in the interface.

Under the surface, Pesalo is two engines sharing one pool of capital:

The two tiers are ring-fenced at the contract level. Protected savings never back a trade. The House is explicit, opt-in, and priced for its risk.

01The Problem

1.1 — Saving is losing

The average US savings account pays 0.45% APY. In Nigeria, Turkey, Argentina, and Pakistan, inflation runs in double digits while dollar accounts are rationed, gated behind minimums, or simply unavailable. Roughly 1.4 billion adults remain unbanked. The people who most need hard-currency savings have the least access to it.

1.2 — Crypto yield is honest about nothing

Stablecoin yield exists, but it arrives wrapped in everything normal savers reject: variable APYs that read "12%" on deposit day and pay 4% a month later, seed phrases, gas fees, and jargon. Existing Stellar wallets pass Blend's variable rate through to users. Nobody on Stellar offers a fixed rate — the single feature ordinary savers actually understand, because it is how every deposit product they have ever trusted works.

1.3 — Retail trading is rigged by structure

In those same markets there is enormous demand for exposure to dollars and gold — served today by offshore CFD brokers where the broker is the counterparty, spreads are opaque, and withdrawals mysteriously fail. Retail traders lose in aggregate everywhere; the flow is captured by the house. The problem is not that the house wins. The problem is that you could never be the house.

02One Pool, Two Sides

The core insight behind Pesalo v2: a savings vault and a perps liquidity pool are the same object. Both are pools of stablecoin capital seeking yield. A lending pool earns from borrowers; a house vault earns from traders. The peer-to-pool perps model — proven at scale by GMX's GLP and Gains Network's gDAI vaults — turns passive depositors into the collective counterparty for leveraged traders, capturing fees, funding, and the structural edge of the house.

Pesalo unifies these into one product with two explicit tiers:

• Save (protected). Fixed rate, fixed term. Capital deployed only to lending and tokenized treasuries. Never exposed to trader PnL. This is the mass-market product.
• Grow (the House, opt-in). Variable, higher expected return, explicitly at risk. This capital is the liquidity backbone of Pesalo Markets and earns everything the house earns — including drawdowns when traders win.

To the user, it is one clean app with a slider between calm and edge.

03Product

Save. Pick a term (1, 3, or 6 months). See the exact rate before you deposit — 7.2% means 7.2%, not "up to." Watch earnings accrue daily. Withdraw at maturity, or exit early by selling your principal position back through the AMM for a small haircut.

Grow. Deposit into the House Vault. See live vault composition, historical performance, and current open interest against it. Withdrawals process in epochs so the House can never be bank-run out from under open positions.

Trade. One-tap perpetuals: USD/NGN, USD/TRY, USD/ARS, gold (XAU), BTC, XLM. USDC-margined, conservative per-asset leverage caps, filled against the House at oracle price plus a dynamic spread. No order book, no partial fills, no counterparty games.

In and out. Fund with USDC from 20+ chains via Circle CCTP V2, or through local on/off-ramps via Stellar anchors in Pesalo's target corridors.

04How It Works

4.1 — Passkeys, not seed phrases

Every Pesalo account is a Soroban smart wallet controlled by a device passkey, using Stellar's native secp256r1 signature verification. Face ID or fingerprint is the key. Launchtube sponsors transaction fees, so users never touch XLM or the concept of gas. Recovery uses a secondary passkey or trusted-contact flow — no 24 words to lose.

4.2 — The fixed-rate engine

1. User deposits USDC and selects a term.
2. The protocol deploys into yield sources: Blend USDC pools (8%+ variable), Etherfuse stablebonds (USTRY, CETES), and tokenized treasuries.
3. The position is tokenized and split: PT (principal, redeemable 1:1 at maturity) + YT (all yield until maturity).
4. The YT is sold on Pesalo's time-aware AMM — an implied-rate curve that decays toward maturity — locking the fixed rate at execution.
5. The user sees one number: their guaranteed APY. The machinery is invisible.

4.3 — The markets engine

Trades execute peer-to-pool against the House Vault. Prices come from Reflector, Stellar's oracle network, using median feeds with deviation guards. A funding rate rebalances long/short skew toward neutral, paid between traders with the House capturing a share. Liquidations trigger at maintenance margin and are executed by keepers, with a fee-funded insurance buffer absorbing gap risk before the vault does.

4.4 — The House Vault

House depositors earn four streams: base yield on idle capital (still parked in Blend), open/close fees, funding share, and net trader PnL. The vault marks down when traders win in aggregate — this is real risk, stated plainly, and it is why the expected return clears the protected tier by a wide margin.

05Risk Architecture

• Segregation by contract. The protected vault and House Vault are separate Soroban contracts. No code path allows Markets to draw on protected principal.
• Open-interest caps. Per-market OI is capped as a percentage of House depth; caps tighten automatically as skew grows.
• Dynamic spreads. Fill spreads widen with skew and volatility, making it expensive to lean on the vault.
• Oracle defense. Median-of-feeds pricing, deviation circuit breakers, and automatic trading halts on anomaly — a direct lesson from the early-2026 oracle incident on a Stellar lending pool.
• Epoch withdrawals. House exits queue by epoch so open positions always remain collateralized.
• Audit-gated launch. Markets does not touch mainnet before independent audit of both engines.

06Why Stellar

• Finality in ~5 seconds, fees of ~$0.00001. A savings app cannot charge $3 to deposit $20. Stellar is one of the only chains where micro-deposits are economically sane.
• Native passkey support. Soroban's protocol-level secp256r1 verification makes the entire no-seed-phrase experience possible without trusted intermediaries.
• Real yield, growing base. Blend holds roughly $95–100M TVL with USDC rates sustained above 8%. Stellar DeFi TVL crossed $174M in Q1 2026 and continues climbing. The RWA base nearly tripled in 2025 to ~$890M — Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree, Spiko, Etherfuse — with State Street's tokenized fund arriving later in 2026.
• Circle-native rails. USDC and EURC are first-class assets; CCTP V2 connects Pesalo to 20+ chains without bridges.
• Anchors. Stellar's regulated on/off-ramp network already operates in exactly the corridors Pesalo targets.

07Business Model

1. Savings spread. Variable source yield minus the fixed rate paid. Scales linearly with Save TVL.
2. Trading fees. Basis points on open/close plus a share of funding flow.
3. House performance fee. 10–15% of House Vault profits — charged on upside only.

No management fee on protected savings. Pesalo earns when savers earn and when the House earns; incentives point the same direction as users'.

08Roadmap

Q3 2026 — Save. Android launch (in progress), fixed-rate USDC terms, CCTP V2 inflows, passkey onboarding.

Q4 2026 — Markets beta. House Vault and FX/gold perpetuals on testnet, then audited mainnet. iOS release.

H1 2027 — Autopilot. Agentic savings on Circle's Arc: mandate-bound agents that auto-sweep income, ladder fixed terms, and rebalance between tiers within user-set policies. Local-currency ramps via anchor partners.

09Team

Pesalo is built by the team behind 29Projects Lab, a multi-chain protocol studio: recipients of a $75K Stellar Community Fund Build Award (Nectar Network, a pooled liquidation protocol live on Soroban) and a Web3 Foundation grant, with production Rust/Soroban contracts already shipped on Stellar. Pesalo operates as an independent product entity.