Kamino CEO Michael Weisz Says KMNO Is Kamino's Only Token and Commits at Least $20M in First Letter to Holders

Solana lender Kamino Finance KMNO$0.030-9.5% has no separate company equity, and KMNO is its only token, CEO Michael Weisz wrote on 2 November 2026. In his first letter to KMNO holders, Weisz said the Kamino Foundation owns the protocol's intellectual property and receives all of its revenue, and that Kamino will commit at least $20 million over two years to expansion.

Weisz announced the letter on X and linked the full text on Kamino's blog. He framed it as an answer to a question he said both longtime holders and newcomers keep asking: "As Kamino grows, where does the value we create go?" Kamino's official account replied with the letter's sign-off, "One Kamino. One KMNO."

Kamino Foundation owns the IP and all revenue, with KMNO as the only token

The core of the letter, as Weisz summarised it, is a statement about structure. "The Kamino Foundation owns the intellectual property and receives all revenue, including revenue from institutional partnerships. KMNO is the only token," he wrote. "The founders, our investors, the team and I have our upside tied to the same token our community holds. None of us has a separate equity allocation."

That matters because many crypto protocols run on two layers: a development company with shareholders and a token held by the public. When the company and the token both have a claim on the business, holders can reasonably ask which one the revenue goes to. Weisz says Kamino has only the token layer.

The holder base that layer serves is broad. More than 56,000 wallets held KMNO on 2 November, according to Solana Compass token data, and the count of KMNO holder accounts rose about 5% between early August and the letter.

Weisz's question about where value goes has sharpened as Kamino pushes into traditional finance. Weisz, a Yieldstreet co-founder, was named CEO in September to lead that expansion, as we covered at the time. In the letter announcement he said Kamino is working to bring its product "into banks, brokerages and wallets", so that "millions of people" can earn on their capital or borrow against assets they already own. Recent examples include Solflare's in-wallet Earn product powered by Kamino and Kamino's Backpack market for loans against tokenized stocks. Under the structure Weisz describes, revenue from partnerships like these goes to the Kamino Foundation.

$20M expansion budget and milestone-based vesting for Weisz's KMNO

Weisz paired the structure with a spending pledge and a condition on his own pay. "We're committing at least $20 million over the next two years to expand the assets people can use on Kamino, and bring Kamino's credit and liquidity infrastructure to more of the platforms consumers already use today," he wrote, introducing the pledge with "what we do with the revenue matters, too."

On pay, Weisz wrote that he chose to make "most of my own KMNO allocation vest only when it reaches and sustains a series of valuation milestones." In plain terms, most of the CEO's tokens unlock only if KMNO's market valuation climbs to set levels and stays there. A standard vesting schedule releases tokens on a calendar whatever the price does. Under milestone vesting, Weisz collects most of his allocation only if the token's valuation rises. The specific milestones are set out in the letter itself, whose text we could not retrieve from Kamino's blog at publication.

How the one-token model compares with Morpho and Aave Labs

Morpho, another lending protocol, has already settled the company-versus-token question the same way. It moved Morpho Labs under the nonprofit Morpho Association, making the MORPHO token its only asset. The association is legally barred from having shareholders or distributing profits, and Morpho argued that protocol fees should be reinvested in growth rather than paid out.

Aave shows what happens when the layers pull apart. In December 2025 Aave delegates objected after swap fees from the Aave interface started flowing to Aave Labs, the development company, instead of the DAO treasury, The Block reported. Founder Stani Kulechov said it was "perfectly fine for Aave Labs to monetize its products, especially as they don't touch the protocol itself."

Moonrock Capital's Simon Dedic put Kamino in the Morpho camp. In a post responding to the letter, he wrote that Kamino "treats its token like equity by letting the foundation own the entire business: the actual equity, the IP, and the entire cash flow," and called it "the most elegant solution in crypto" for making a token investable.

What to check in the full KMNO holder letter

Weisz's post covers where value sits. These details sit in the full letter or are still to come, and are worth checking:

• the valuation milestones for Weisz's KMNO, how long each must be sustained, and what share of his allocation they cover
• whether other team members' tokens follow similar terms
• where the $20 million comes from and how it will be spent across new assets and partner platforms
• whether foundation revenue reaches KMNO holders directly, through buybacks or distributions, or stays with the foundation to fund growth, the approach Morpho chose

The bank, brokerage and wallet integrations Kamino is chasing all run on its Solana lending markets. With this letter, Weisz has put on the record that the revenue from them goes to the Kamino Foundation, with KMNO as the only token attached to that business.