Kamino Finance

Kamino Finance (Kamino) is a lending and credit protocol on Solana; the name is shared with an ocean planet in Star Wars. Its core product, Kamino Lend, is Solana's largest money market: users supply assets to earn interest and borrow against crypto, liquid staking tokens and tokenized real-world assets. Around it sit curated Earn vaults, Multiply for one-click leveraged positions, automated liquidity vaults and a zero-fee swap aggregator. On 21 September 2026 Kamino added fixed-rate, fixed-term borrowing. Kamino launched in August 2022 as a concentrated-liquidity vault manager, and by September 2026 CoinDesk reported it managed about $1.4 billion in assets. Its governance token is KMNO.

How Kamino Lend works: markets, interest rates and liquidations

Kamino Lend (K-Lend) is a pool-based, over-collateralised lending program at KLend2g3cP87fffoy8q1mQqGKjrxjC8boSyAYavgmjD, open source on GitHub. Lenders deposit into reserves and earn interest set by a utilisation curve: as more of a reserve is borrowed, the borrow rate rises. Borrowers post collateral and can draw loans up to each asset's loan-to-value limit. Kamino's fee documentation states there are no deposit, withdrawal or origination fees; the protocol earns a spread on interest of roughly 11% to 20% depending on the asset and market.

Since the Kamino Lend V2 upgrade, which RockawayX notes kept the V1 codebase at its core so users did not have to migrate funds, the protocol is split into a market layer and a vault layer. The market layer lets curators create isolated markets with their own assets, oracles, caps and rate curves. That is how single-asset markets such as USDai, tGBP and Hastra's PRIME exist without exposing the main market to them.

Positions that breach their liquidation threshold are liquidated with a bonus that starts at a per-reserve minimum (around 2% for major assets) and scales with how far the loan is underwater. Kamino's risk page also lists daily borrow caps, E-Mode caps and an auto-deleverage safeguard.

Kamino Earn vaults: curated USDC and stablecoin yield

Kamino Earn vaults are single-asset lending vaults where a named curator decides which Kamino Lend reserves the deposits are lent into. A depositor picks a vault (Galaxy's USDC vault, an Allez Labs or Steakhouse Financial vault, for example) instead of picking markets. Curators are paid a performance fee on profits and an annual AUM fee, set per vault, according to Kamino's curator documentation.

Two protections sit on top. Curators can lock their own capital in an insurance pool with a cooldown, and vaults can be limited to Kamino-whitelisted reserves so a compromised curator key cannot route deposits into an arbitrary market. Neither is mandatory, so they are worth checking vault by vault.

Institutional curators have joined through 2026. Galaxy Curation launched USDC and USDT vaults on Kamino on 17 September 2026, per Galaxy Digital's announcement. Earlier that month, Kamino vaults went live in the Binance Wallet DeFi tab, and Kamino reported $100 million in deposits from Binance Wallet users nine days later.

Kamino Multiply: one-click leveraged loops explained

Kamino Multiply opens a leveraged "loop" in one transaction. It flash-borrows the debt asset, swaps into the collateral asset, deposits it, borrows against it and repays the flash loan; if any step fails, the whole transaction reverts. Kamino's Multiply documentation gives the net yield as collateral yield times leverage, minus the borrow rate times leverage minus one, with a 0.001% flash-loan fee per open, adjust or close.

Maximum leverage depends on how correlated the pair is. The docs cite about 4x at 75% LTV for SOL against USDC, about 7.5x in the SOL/BTC E-Mode, and 10x at 90% LTV for Jito JTO$0.565-0.9%'s JitoSOL against SOL, where both sides move together. Popular loops in 2026 include liquid staking tokens against SOL, JLP, and yield-bearing RWA tokens against USDC.

The trade-off is that Multiply on variable rates only pays while the collateral yield beats the borrow rate. If borrow rates spike, the position earns less or loses money, and high leverage leaves a thin buffer before liquidation. For LST collateral, Multiply prices by stake rate rather than spot, which protects against a brief market depeg but not against an exploit in the staking protocol itself.

Kamino Fixed Rates: fixed-term borrowing with auto rollover

Kamino Fixed Rates, live since 21 September 2026, let borrowers lock an interest rate for a set term instead of paying a floating rate. Kamino's fixed-rate documentation describes a "rate grid" of separate reserves for each rate and duration (1, 3, 6 or 12 months), so the market forms a yield curve. Fixed Rates are built into existing Kamino Lend markets and reuse their collateral, liquidation and risk machinery.

The first market, launched with Hastra (Hastra wYLDS$1.0000.0%) and Figure, offered AUTO (a token backed by US auto loans) against wYLDS with rolling 30-day terms at a 5.3% fixed rate. Kamino said $10 million of AUTO fixed-rate loans were originated in the first 72 hours. On 25 September 2026 OnRe's market added fixed-rate USDC borrowing against ONyc at 8% over rolling 30-day terms, starting with $1.5 million of liquidity.

Auto Rollover is on by default: at the end of a term the loan rolls into a new fixed term, or falls back to the variable rate, if liquidity allows. If no liquidity is available, the loan does not roll and an auto-repay process gradually sells collateral, at a cost that ramps the longer the borrower waits. Lenders cannot exit mid-term; their queued withdrawals block rollovers in that reserve. A penalty for repaying early applies in the first term only. For Multiply users, Fixed Rate Multiply removes the variable-rate risk described above, but adds rollover risk at each expiry.

Kamino RWA lending: PRIME, AUTO, USDai, tGBP and tokenized stocks

Kamino has become the main venue for borrowing against tokenized real-world assets on Solana. Blockworks Research data showed Kamino's share of onchain RWA lending rising from 2% to 18% between October 2025 and August 2026. CoinDesk reported that the PRIME market, built on Figure's tokenized home-equity loans, passed $600 million in deposits within 107 days of launch.

Most RWA collateral sits in isolated markets with their own curator. In September 2026 alone, Kamino launched a market for USD.AI's GPU-loan-backed sUSDai, curated by Allez Labs (Kamino announcement), and a tGBP market for a regulated sterling stablecoin, curated by Steakhouse Financial (announcement). Superstate's tokenized funds crossed $17 million as active collateral in July 2026.

Kamino also supports tokenized equities from xStocks AAPLx$334.29+0.1%, with documented guides for going long or short xStocks. As of August 2026 Kamino Lend held 82.6% of Solana's tokenized stock lending market. RWA collateral carries issuer, legal and redemption risk on top of Kamino's own smart contract risk.

Kamino Institutional Yield vaults and off-chain collateral

Kamino Institutional Yield vaults route USDC through a special-purpose vehicle into regulated, fully collateralised off-chain loans. Kamino's Institutional Yield documentation describes two products: Commodity Yield, lending to corporates and commodity traders against physical commodities or escrowed cash, and Digital Assets Yield, lending to KYC-verified institutions against BTC held at qualified custodians at no more than 60% LTV. Withdrawals combine an instant buffer with a queue. The docs state plainly that depositors receive no deposit insurance or regulatory recourse.

Kamino said on 29 September 2026 that its Institutional Commodity Yield Vault had passed $50 million in deposits, targeting 7%+ yield (our coverage).

These vaults grew out of the six products Kamino announced at Breakpoint on 12 December 2025, per its governance post: Fixed Rates (FalconX as pilot borrower), Borrow Intents, off-chain collateral built with Chainlink with Anchorage Digital as first custodian, Private Credit, an RWA DEX and BuildKit. Fixed Rates, borrow orders, the institutional vaults and the BuildKit API and SDKs are now documented as live. We could not confirm the launch status of off-chain collateral or the RWA DEX from Kamino's docs as of October 2026.

Kamino Liquidity vaults and Kamino Swap

Kamino Liquidity, the product Kamino launched with in 2022, runs automated concentrated-liquidity vaults on Orca ORCA$1.97+7.1% Whirlpools, Raydium RAY$2.11+1.3% CLMM and Meteora MET$0.299+0.3% DLMM pools. Depositors receive kTokens, and the vault rebalances the price range, compounds fees and collects rewards, per the kliquidity SDK. It runs on a separate program, 6LtLpnUFNByNXLyCoK9wA2MykKAmQNZKBdY8s47dehDc, listed as Kliquidity on Kamino's program address page. Automated rebalancing does not remove impermanent loss.

Kamino Swap is a meta-aggregator. Its docs say it queries more than 15 routing engines, including Jupiter JUP$0.332+0.4%, DFlow and OKX, simulates the result on-chain and executes the best route, with no platform fee. It also offers zero-fee limit orders. On 1 October 2026 Binance Wallet's router was added as a Kamino Swap route.

Is Kamino Finance safe? Audits, upgrade authority and risks

Kamino has run since 2022 without a reported exploit and is heavily audited, though leverage, oracles, curators and upgradeable code still carry risk. Kamino's audit page lists 15 audits from OtterSec, Sec3, Offside Labs and RX Security across Kamino Lend, Earn vaults, the Scope oracle, limit orders, Liquidity vaults and Farms, with no critical findings. Kamino Lend was also formally verified by Certora, whose 2025 review found a precision-loss bug in the exchange-rate maths (fixed, and not exploitable at realistic token supplies), and by OtterSec. Kamino's risk page reports $0 of bad debt since November 2023, including the 5-6 February 2026 SOL crash, when $19.36 million of collateral was liquidated.

Audit scope matters. The listed Kamino Lend audits are dated July 2023 to February 2025. Fixed Rates launched in September 2026 inside the same program, and the audit page did not list a separate review of it as of 1 October 2026.

The K-Lend program is upgradeable. On-chain data from the solgov monitor, checked on 1 October 2026, shows Kamino's upgrade authority is a Squads multisig needing 5 of 10 signers with a 24-hour timelock. A single key cannot push an upgrade, but a quorum of signers can change the code without a token vote.

Other risks: prices come from Kamino's Scope aggregator over Pyth Network PYTH$0.078-0.3%, Chainlink, Switchboard and RedStone feeds, so a bad price feed could trigger wrongful liquidations; isolated markets and Earn vaults depend on the competence of their curators; and RWA and institutional products add off-chain counterparty, custody and legal risk that no smart contract audit covers.

Who Kamino Finance suits

Kamino suits Solana users who want to earn on idle USDC, SOL or LSTs without managing positions, through an Earn vault, and users comfortable with liquidation risk who want leveraged staking or RWA yield through Multiply. Fixed Rates fit borrowers who need a known cost for 30 days or longer, such as leveraged RWA strategies on 30-day terms.

It is a poorer fit for beginners who don't understand loan-to-value ratios: Multiply at 8-10x can be liquidated by a small move in a correlated pair or a sharp borrow-rate spike. Fixed-rate borrowers also need to watch expiry dates or keep rollover liquidity in mind. Institutional Yield and some RWA markets need KYC and are not available to everyone; users should check which jurisdictions Kamino allows in its terms.

Kamino vs Jupiter Lend, Save and Loopscale

Kamino offers the widest product range among Solana lenders, and its fixed-rate product now overlaps with Loopscale's niche. Jupiter Lend, launched in August 2025, is Kamino's most direct rival and is integrated into the Jupiter app. In December 2025 the two protocols clashed publicly over Jupiter Lend's "isolated vault" claims, and Kamino blocked Jupiter's refinance tool from moving Kamino loans. The Solana Foundation's president, Lily Liu, urged both teams to stop the public dispute.

Save N/A$0.194-12.9% (formerly Solend) is the older pool-based alternative. Loopscale matches lenders and borrowers one-to-one on an order book at fixed rates and terms, while Kamino Fixed Rates add terms with auto rollover to its existing pooled markets. Compare live rates, caps and liquidation rules for the specific asset on each protocol before moving a position.

KMNO token, team and history

KMNO is Kamino's governance token, launched on 30 April 2024 with a total supply of 10 billion and about 1 billion circulating at launch. The KMNO documentation allocates 35% to community and grants, 35% to key stakeholders and advisors, 20% to core contributors and 10% to liquidity and treasury, with insider allocations on a 12-month lockup and 24-month linear vest. Governance discussion runs on the Kamino forum, which also hosts monthly risk reports.

Kamino launched in August 2022 with automated liquidity vaults and added Kamino Lend in 2023; co-founder Marius Ciubotariu has presented its roadmap at Breakpoint. On 15 September 2026 Kamino named Michael Weisz, co-founder of Yieldstreet, as chief executive, and CoinDesk reported plans for a New York office and hires for a CFO and head of legal.