What Is Kamino?

Kamino (ticker KMNO) is the native token of Kamino Finance, a decentralized finance protocol on the Solana blockchain that combines lending, liquidity, and leverage in one product suite. Users can lend and borrow assets through its K-Lend money market, deposit into automated liquidity vaults that manage concentrated liquidity positions, and open leveraged positions through its Multiply and Long/Short products. By total value locked, Kamino has consistently ranked among the largest DeFi protocols on Solana, and at times the largest outright.

Overview - Table of Contents
What Is Kamino?
Getting Started With Kamino
How To Get A Kamino Wallet?
Kamino Resources
How To Buy Kamino?
Latest Kamino News

Kamino was incubated by the team behind Hubble Protocol, a Solana stablecoin project co-founded in 2021 by Marius Ciubotariu, a former senior software engineer at Bloomberg. Kamino launched in August 2022 as an automated liquidity manager that rebalanced concentrated liquidity positions on Solana DEXes, sparing users the constant manual adjustment those positions normally require. In November 2023 the team launched K-Lend, a purpose-built lending market, and Kamino grew from a yield tool into a full borrowing and lending venue that eclipsed its parent project.

K-Lend is Kamino's core. It is a peer-to-pool money market in the style of Aave, where depositors earn interest and borrowers post collateral, but it adds features designed for Solana's ecosystem: isolated and cross-margin modes, an elevation mode that allows higher loan-to-value ratios between correlated assets such as SOL and liquid staking tokens, and risk management tuned for assets like JLP and JitoSOL. On top of K-Lend, the Multiply product automates leveraged looping, for example borrowing SOL against a liquid staking token to amplify staking yield in one click. The liquidity side of the protocol runs automated vaults that compound and rebalance positions on Solana DEXes such as Orca and Raydium.

KMNO launched on April 30, 2024 with a genesis airdrop that distributed 7.5 percent of the supply to early users based on points earned in the protocol's first season. Total supply is 10 billion KMNO, allocated 35 percent to community and grants (the genesis airdrop and subsequent seasonal distributions draw from this bucket), 35 percent to key stakeholders and advisors, 20 percent to core contributors, and 10 percent to liquidity and treasury. The contributor and stakeholder allocations were locked for 12 months and then vest linearly over 24 months, so the circulating supply has grown substantially since launch.

The token's main uses are governance and rewards. KMNO holders can stake the token to boost the rewards they earn for using the protocol, and staked KMNO carries voting power over risk parameters, asset listings, reward campaigns, and treasury decisions, with proposals discussed on Kamino's governance forum. Later reward seasons moved from a points-only model to direct monthly KMNO distributions for lenders and borrowers.

In May 2025 Kamino launched Kamino Lend V2, a modular rebuild of its lending infrastructure that added curated Earn vaults, where third-party risk managers can run their own lending strategies, along with margin leverage and a unified loan dashboard. In December 2025, at the Solana Breakpoint conference in Abu Dhabi, the project unveiled a broader rebrand (including the move to the kamino.com domain) and a roadmap aimed at institutional finance and tokenized real-world assets, spanning fixed rates, borrow intents, off-chain collateral, private credit, an RWA exchange, and a developer BuildKit.

Getting Started With Kamino

Getting started with Kamino usually means trying the protocol itself, since using it is the main way to earn KMNO rewards:

Step 1: Set up a Solana wallet such as Phantom or Solflare and fund it with some SOL for transaction fees.
Step 2: Visit the Kamino app at kamino.com, connect your wallet, and explore the lending markets, vaults, and Multiply strategies.
Step 3: Start small: deposit an asset like USDC or SOL into K-Lend to earn interest, or into an automated liquidity vault.
Step 4: If you hold KMNO, stake it through the app to boost your rewards and participate in governance votes.

Note that Kamino's official web app restricts access from certain jurisdictions in line with its terms of use, which state that users must not be a "U.S. Person" (a United States citizen, resident, or entity) or located in a sanctioned or embargoed country. Visitors from a restricted region see a notice that "Kamino Finance is not available in your region" and are limited to a withdraw-only interface that lets them remove existing funds but not open new positions. This is a restriction on the official front-end rather than the underlying Solana smart contracts, and the KMNO token itself remains available to buy and hold through exchanges and any Solana wallet.

How to Get a Kamino Wallet?

KMNO is an SPL token on Solana, so any major Solana wallet can hold it and connect to the Kamino app.

Phantom

Phantom is the most widely used Solana wallet, available as a browser extension and mobile app. It supports KMNO and all the assets used on Kamino, and connects directly to the protocol's web app.

Solflare

Solflare is a long-running Solana-native wallet with browser, mobile, and web versions. It offers detailed control over Solana staking and token accounts alongside standard DeFi connectivity.

Hardware Wallets

A Ledger device can be paired with Phantom or Solflare so that your private keys stay offline while you interact with Kamino, which is recommended for larger balances.

Kamino Resources

How to Buy Kamino?

KMNO is available on both centralized and decentralized exchanges.

Centralized Exchanges

KMNO is listed on major exchanges including Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Bybit, OKX, KuCoin, and Gate, typically traded against USDT or USD. Binance added the token in May 2025.

Decentralized Exchanges

On Solana itself, KMNO can be swapped through aggregators and DEXes such as Jupiter, Orca, and Raydium directly from a Solana wallet.

Latest Kamino News

Kamino's recent direction has been a push beyond crypto-native lending into institutional and real-world-asset finance. Kamino Lend V2 went live on Solana mainnet in May 2025 with modular markets and curator-run Earn vaults, and the December 2025 rebrand laid out a product slate that includes fixed-rate lending, private credit, off-chain collateral, and an RWA exchange. In early 2026, Kamino expanded into institutional lending through a custody arrangement with Anchorage Digital that lets institutions borrow against natively staked SOL held in regulated custody.

The protocol remains one of Solana's largest by total value locked, with DeFi analytics site DeFiLlama showing on the order of a billion dollars in TVL plus a comparable amount in active loans in mid-2026. Because TVL, reward seasons, and listed markets change frequently, the official website, documentation, and governance forum are the best sources for the current state of the protocol.