Paena

Problem Statement

Paena is a direct to consumer earned wage access platform that lets workers tap a button and get small advances on the wages they have already earned, without touching credit cards or predatory payday loans. Users connect their existing US checking account, verify their income with a pay stub, and get access to a simple limit, such as four advances of 100 dollars in a thirty day cycle. Each advance lands in their bank account in minutes, and they repay automatically on payday via ACH, with a flat dollar fee instead of confusing interest. Under the hood, advances are funded from a pooled USDC liquidity vault on an Ethereum L2, but all of the crypto is completely abstracted away. In the app, users only ever see dollars, their available limit, and a clean timeline of advances and repayments.

Solution

We built Paena as a web app using Next.js and TypeScript, with a Postgres database and Prisma to track users, advances, cycles, and repayments. Each user gets a Privy embedded wallet that actually holds USDC, while the frontend shows only a simple dollar balance. Liquidity comes from an LP funded USDC vault implemented as an ERC 4626 style smart contract on an Ethereum L2 like Base, which lets us track shares for LPs and route capital into and out of the pool in a single place. On the fiat side, we integrate Bridge’s APIs for onramp and offramp so that advances can be pushed to the user bank account and ACH repayments can flow back into the vault without Paena ever touching fiat directly. Plaid is used for KYC, bank linking, and income verification from pay stubs, which feeds into our risk rules for setting monthly limits and blocking advances when repayment fails. Admin and LP dashboards sit on top of the same backend and contracts, giving us crypto level visibility for operations while the consumer interface stays as a simple Venmo style experience.