Kamino Finance

Kamino Finance is Solana's largest decentralized money market, offering lending, borrowing, automated yield vaults, leveraged looping strategies, and isolated markets for real-world assets (RWAs). It began as a concentrated liquidity manager for Orca Whirlpool positions in August 2022 and expanded into a full DeFi credit stack over the following two years.

What Problem It Solves

Solana's DeFi ecosystem lacked deep, capital-efficient money markets that could compete with Ethereum's Aave and Compound. Kamino was built to fill that gap: a single protocol where users can passively earn yield on idle assets, borrow against collateral without selling it, lever up directional positions, and deploy capital through curated vault strategies — all without leaving Solana.

Core Products

Lending Markets (K-Lend / Lend V2)

Kamino's lending protocol operates as a set of isolated money markets. Depositors supply assets to earn variable interest paid by borrowers; borrowers post collateral and draw loans up to a configured loan-to-value ratio. Interest rates adjust dynamically based on utilization: as a pool fills with borrowers, rates rise to attract new supply and cool demand.

Lend V2, launched in 2025, made market creation permissionless. Any curator — a risk team or protocol — can deploy a market with its own collateral types, LTV ratios, and liquidation thresholds. Notable curators managing risk parameters on Kamino include Allez Labs, Gauntlet, Rockaway, Steakhouse Financial, and Sentora. Market administration keys transfer to Squads multisigs before launch, distributing control beyond any single operator.

Liquidations are permissionless. When a borrowing position breaches its liquidation threshold, any participant can repay the debt and claim the collateral at a penalty discount of roughly 5 percent. The protocol had accumulated zero bad debt as of mid-2026.

Automated Yield Vaults

Kamino's vaults accept a single token deposit and automatically allocate capital across lending reserves according to curator-defined strategies. Users receive a share token representing their position; yield accrues automatically. Strategy profiles range from conservative (stablecoin-only, major-protocol reserves) to aggressive (higher-yield, higher-risk allocations). Curators such as Steakhouse Financial and Re7 Labs maintain the allocation models. Vault deposits exceeded $593 million by September 2025.

Concentrated Liquidity Vaults

Kamino's original product auto-rebalances positions within Orca Whirlpool concentrated liquidity ranges. When a price moves outside the active range, the vault rebalances to keep capital earning fees, reducing the manual overhead of CLMM management and limiting unproductive out-of-range capital. These vaults reached approximately $836 million in TVL in early 2024.

Multiply (Leveraged Looping)

Multiply enables users to open leveraged long or short positions by looping: depositing an asset as collateral, borrowing the paired asset, swapping it back, and re-depositing in a single transaction. The feature targets yield maximization on liquid staking tokens (for example, borrowing USDC against jitoSOL and swapping to more jitoSOL) and directional speculation. The leverage is executed through flash-loan mechanics with auto-optimized parameters.

RWA Markets

Starting in late 2025 and accelerating through 2026, Kamino added fully isolated lending markets for real-world asset tokens. Each RWA market is siloed with dedicated risk parameters, so a problem in one market cannot affect others. Assets available as collateral have included PAXG (Paxos Gold, enabling gold-backed borrowing), AUTO (Agora Data, routing depositor capital into U.S. near-prime auto loan cash flows), oTFY (Obligate, short-duration commodity trade-finance exposure — up to $200 million notional — that holders can borrow USDC against without selling), and OnRe, Huma, and Solstice, additional credit and insurance RWA tokens with combined deposit growth of tens of millions of dollars over 30-day windows in mid-2026. RWA markets are curated by institutional risk teams — RockawayX manages the oTFY market — and use Chainlink low-latency oracles for pricing.

Supported Assets

Kamino supports the full range of Solana blue-chip tokens — SOL, USDC, USDT, wrapped BTC (wBTC, cbBTC), ETH, and stablecoins — as well as liquid staking tokens (mSOL, jitoSOL, bSOL, and others) as yield-bearing collateral. A distinctive feature is collateral rehypothecation: deposited collateral continues earning its native yield even while securing a loan, so a jitoSOL deposit accrues staking rewards at the same time it backs a USDC borrow. The RWA market expansion adds tokenized credit and commodity instruments as collateral types, expanding the range of assets that can generate on-chain leverage.

Security and Audits

The protocol has been audited by OtterSec, Halborn, and Offside. Formal smart contract verification was completed by mid-2026. Oracle security relies on Chainlink low-latency feeds. Risk parameters across markets are actively monitored by Gauntlet, a risk management firm that also works with major Ethereum protocols. Zero bad debt has been recorded since launch.

KMNO Token

Kamino's governance token, KMNO, launched in late 2024. It grants holders voting rights on protocol governance, staking boosts on lending rewards, and access to seasonal incentive programs. KMNO does not carry a direct claim on protocol revenue. The token peaked at approximately $0.247 in December 2024 and traded near $0.018 with a market cap of around $91 million as of July 2026, reflecting the broader decline in DeFi token valuations during that period.

Team and History

Kamino launched in August 2022 as an automated CLMM manager for Orca Whirlpools. The founding team has not publicly disclosed identities. The protocol expanded to lending in 2023, crossed $1 billion in TVL, and reached a peak TVL of approximately $2.8 billion in Q3 2025. An institutional pivot in late 2025 added fixed-rate loan products, a private credit vault, and an RWA-focused DEX. Total deposits (cumulative) reached $4.4 billion by mid-2025. TVL declined to approximately $1.5 billion by April 2026, tracking a combination of SOL price correction and sector-wide deleveraging. Roughly 65 percent of TVL sits in lending pools; the remainder is in vaults.

Solana Ecosystem Role

Kamino is the dominant money market on Solana, playing a role comparable to Aave on Ethereum. It is a primary venue for on-chain stablecoin yield — USDC supply rates have ranged between 4 and 9 percent APY across 2026 depending on borrow demand — and a destination for institutional capital seeking Solana-native credit returns. Partners from traditional finance, including Apollo and Maple, have used Kamino's infrastructure to deploy credit yields on-chain. The protocol's curator model, where independent risk teams manage isolated markets, has made it the preferred venue for RWA integrations on Solana, with activity accelerating notably through mid-2026.