Kamino adds new institutional loans, RWA, developer kit products in platform rebrand

Kamino Lending, the growing DeFi protocol on Solana, will rebrand and offer six new products. Kamino announced its plans during the Solana Breakpoint event in Abu Dhabi. 

Kamino will shift from pure crypto lending to a wider selection of DeFi products, offering six new services. The app is trying to adapt to a shifting DeFi climate, as Solana attempts to gain a wider share of DeFi and external liquidity. 

The biggest shift on Kamino will affect its capacity to tokenize real-world assets. Kamino chose this path of expansion after significant RWA growth in the past year. 

Kamino previously worked to provide liquidity and increase its influence by accepting multiple meme tokens as collateral. The protocol accrued $2.59B in total value locked. 

The slower Solana meme market and the risky collateral, however, led Kamino to reshape its business. The protocol now aims to become the bridge between asset tokenization and DeFi. 

Kamino targets institutional users

During the Solana meme boom, Kamino served retail and whale insiders, providing USDC liquidity against stablecoins. 

For 2026, Kamino set a new plan, aiming to offer institutional-grade services. To that end, Kamino unveiled its six new products, partially linked to its lending structure. 

Kamino will add a fixed-rate product, locking the borrowing rate for a certain term. FalconX will become the pilot borrower, demonstrating the institutional-grade credit. 

Another product will build a lending market through borrowing intents. Potential borrowers will post their desired terms, and will be matched with lenders.

Lending in the crypto space is a bit too volatile. Rates depend on liquidity pool utilization and can vary widely, creating high-risk, unpredictable loans. By necessity, crypto has also had to use much larger collateral to secure some of its loans, leading to inefficiencies that are not acceptable to institutions. 

Kamino will also integrate off-chain collateral, allowing on-chain borrowing for assets in qualified custody. The protocol will use Chainlink data and issue loans in partnership with Anchorage Digital. Kamino will also join the private credit trend by launching a new BTC-backed USDC vault. 

For RWA expansion, the protocol aims to launch a specialized DEX. The protocol will build liquidity for tokenized assets, while also using precise oracles for pricing. Currently, XStocks is the standard of Solana-based tokenized stocks, but the assets are not integrated into DeFi. 

The last new product will be a Build Kit, targeting developers with SDK and API access, to integrate Kamino yield into other apps. 

Kamino is still the leading lending protocol on Solana

Kamino Lend is still the biggest lending protocol on Solana. As a whole, the chain carries $3.6B locked in lending liquidity, of which Kamino has a share of up to 75%. 

The biggest competitor of Kamino is Jupiter Lend, which emerged in the second half of 2025 and quickly started accumulating loans. Initially, Kamino even tried to prevent its users from using Jupiter Lend. 

The recent expansion with new products may boost the overall market share of Kamino and offset some of the lost revenues from retail users switching to Jupiter Lend. 

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