Save

Save is a lending and borrowing app on Solana. It used to be called Solend, and it has no link to the banks and loan firms that also use the name Save Finance. You deposit tokens on Save to earn interest, or post them as collateral to borrow other tokens. There is no fixed date to pay a loan back. At its rebrand, Save described itself as "Solana's permissionless savings account". It launched in 2021 and renamed itself Save in July 2024. The same on-chain program has run the whole time. Its main feature is risk split into pools: a main pool for major tokens, isolated pools for riskier ones, and pools that anyone can create.

How Save (Solend) lending works: deposits, interest and cTokens

Save works like Aave or Compound on Ethereum. Lenders put tokens into a shared pool. Borrowers take tokens out of that pool and pay interest. The interest rate moves on its own with demand: the more of a pool is lent out, the higher the rate. Save's docs say you can use it to earn interest, borrow, take a leveraged long, or go short.

When you deposit, Save gives you a cToken, a receipt for your share of the pool. The cToken grows in value as borrowers pay interest. When you withdraw, you hand it back and get your tokens plus what they earned.

Here is a simple example. You deposit SOL, then borrow USDC against it. If SOL's price rises, you can repay the USDC and keep the gain. That is a leveraged long. Borrow SOL against USDC and sell it, and you are short.

Save's account of each wallet's deposits and loans is called an obligation. Each loan has a health score. If the score falls too far, your position can be liquidated, as covered further down.

Lending and borrowing fees: what lenders and borrowers pay

Save's fee page lists three main charges. The protocol keeps 20% of the interest borrowers pay, so lenders earn the other 80%. Borrowers pay a one-off origination fee of 0.1% on each loan. And 30% of each liquidation penalty goes to the DAO treasury. You also pay normal Solana network fees, plus a small one-time deposit to open your Save accounts.

Main, isolated and permissionless lending pools

Save keeps risky tokens away from the bulk of its deposits. The pool docs describe three kinds of pool. The main pool holds most of the money and lists tokens with reliable price feeds and deep trading markets. Isolated pools hold riskier tokens. If something goes wrong there, the damage stays in that smaller pool. Tokens often start in an isolated pool and move to the main pool once they prove stable.

Permissionless pools go further. Anyone can create a lending pool for any Solana token. The pool's creator sets its rules and earns 20% of the origination fees in that pool, per the permissionless pool guide. Creators must connect a Pyth Network PYTH$0.067+4.2% or Switchboard SWTCH$0.00002446-7.3% price feed, and the pool needs liquidators to work safely.

This is where you can borrow against tokens that bigger lenders won't list. Jito JTO$0.320-1.6%'s docs, for example, point to a community pool on Save where you can deposit JitoSOL. The same page warns that such pools carry more risk. Save says it cannot pay back losses from bad debt in a permissionless pool. Before you deposit, check who created the pool and how it is set up.

Solend V2 safety limits: borrow weights, outflow caps and TWAP prices

Save added a set of safety limits after its 2022 incidents. The Solend V2 litepaper describes them, and the live app shows some of them on its pool pages.

Borrow weights make risky loans count for more. A loan of a volatile token uses up more of your borrowing power than the same loan in a stablecoin. Outflow limits cap how much can be borrowed or withdrawn from a pool in 24 hours. That limits how fast an attacker could drain one. Time-weighted prices, or TWAP, mean a sudden price spike does not instantly raise how much you can borrow. The litepaper also adds protected collateral, which earns no interest but can always be withdrawn.

On the Save app, each pool lists every asset's loan-to-value and borrow weight side by side.

Liquidations on Save: thresholds and the liquidator bonus

A loan on Save is liquidated when your collateral falls too close to what you owe. Each token has a liquidation threshold. Once your position crosses it, anyone can repay part of your loan and take some of your collateral at a discount. No central keeper is needed.

The liquidation docs give an example. A liquidator repays 20% of the loan, paid for with the borrower's collateral, and keeps an extra 5% of that amount as a bonus. The V2 litepaper makes the bonus dynamic, so it varies with how unhealthy the loan is.

Prices come from Pyth and Switchboard oracles, per Save's risk docs. Wrong prices can trigger liquidations that should not happen, which the docs list as a risk.

saveSOL, SUSD and dumpy.fun: what Save launched with the rebrand

The rename in July 2024 came with three new products, Decrypt reported.

saveSOL is Save's liquid staking token. You stake SOL and get saveSOL, which earns staking rewards but can still be traded or used as collateral. saveSOL has its own page in the Save app.

SUSD is a stablecoin that Save said would let you borrow against SOL at 0% interest. Founder Rooter compared this with USDC and USDT loans, which had averaged about 10% a year on Save in the month before. Decrypt said saveSOL could also be used as collateral for SUSD.

dumpy.fun is a site for shorting Solana memecoins, built on Save's borrowing.

The Save app's menu in November 2026 shows lending pools, rewards, saveSOL and a revenue page. SUSD and dumpy.fun do not appear in it. Check their current status with Save before you use either one.

SLND to SAVE: the token migration and SEND for Suilend

SAVE is the token that replaced SLND, Solend's original token. The switch happened on December 12, 2024, according to Suilend's conversion docs.

Holders who switched also got a share of SEND, the token of Suilend, a sister lending app on the Sui blockchain built by the same team. SLND holders were set aside 15% of SEND's supply, or 0.15 mSEND per SAVE. That bonus ended on December 12, 2025. You can still turn SLND into SAVE, but it no longer comes with SEND.

If you find old SLND in a wallet, use the conversion on the official Save site. Other tokens trade on Solana under the SAVE ticker, so check the mint address before you buy or swap.

Is Save (Solend) safe? Audits, upgrade control and past exploits

Save is one of the longest-running lenders on Solana, but it has had incidents, and its program is controlled by its team. Audits, upgrade control and the incident record are the three things to weigh.

Audits: Kudelski, Sec3, Neodyme and OSEC

The security page lists a full audit by Kudelski Security from September 2021. The published report covers version 1.0 of the lending program, so it predates the V2 changes. The page also lists a scan with Sec3's automated tool. Save's risk docs add Neodyme and OSEC to its list of auditors, and mention a bug bounty of up to $1 million. The security page does not link reports for those two.

Who can upgrade the Save program

The Save program can be changed. Save's access control docs say the team holds the single key that can upgrade it, and that no timelock delays upgrades. A separate market owner key can change pool settings, but the docs say it cannot move user funds. OtterSec's build checker shows the program is not frozen, and at its last check in July 2025 the on-chain code did not match a verified build of the public source. In practice, you are trusting the team not to push a harmful upgrade.

Solend exploits and controversies, 2021 to 2022

On August 19, 2021, an attacker abused a flawed admin check to change pool settings. Some users were wrongly liquidated and lost about $16,000, which Solend paid back, per Helius's record of Solana hacks.

In June 2022, a vote called SLND1 let the team take over a whale's at-risk loan. The community overturned it a day later, The Block reported.

In November 2022, an attacker pushed up the price of the USDH stablecoin on a thin market. A price feed read the fake price, and the attacker borrowed against it. That left about $1.26 million in bad debt in three isolated pools, The Block reported. The main pool was not affected. Helius says the treasury covered the loss.

Other risks are common to lenders. When a pool is 100% lent out, you cannot withdraw until borrowers repay or others deposit.

Who should use Save

Save suits Solana users who want to borrow against a token that larger lenders don't list, through an isolated or permissionless pool. It also fits lenders who prefer a plain pool model with a long record on mainnet.

It suits you less if you want the deepest markets and most options. Kamino Lend and Jupiter Lend had grown much larger by December 2025, per RedStone. If you lend into a permissionless pool, you take on the creator's choices, and Save will not cover losses there.

Save vs Kamino, Jupiter Lend and Marginfi

Save is older and smaller than the two biggest lenders on Solana. RedStone, a price feed firm, looked at Solana lending in a report from December 2025. It called Save one of the first lenders on Solana, with a plain pool model like Aave's. It put Save behind Kamino Lend and Jupiter Lend. It said Jupiter Lend grew faster than any money market in Solana's history.

Pick Save if one of its pools lists a token you need, or if you value its long record. Pick Kamino or Jupiter Lend if you want bigger markets. Marginfi is another lender that has been on Solana for years.

For saveSOL, the main rivals are bigger staking tokens such as Marinade's mSOL and JitoSOL. Solana Compass, which runs this site, also runs a validator and its own staking token, compassSOL. That token competes with saveSOL. You can compare Solana stake pools side by side.

Solend history and team

Solend went live on Solana in 2021. A founder who goes by the name Rooter leads the team. In March 2024 the same team launched Suilend on Sui, its first app outside Solana. At the time, Sui called Solend the largest lending protocol on Solana, with more than 170,000 users.

The code is open source on GitHub under the solendprotocol name. The main lending program is a fork of Solana Labs' token-lending program.