Kamino Finance announced two changes on Sept. 15: Yieldstreet co-founder Michael Weisz will become CEO, and the protocol is opening a New York headquarters with about 20,000 square feet of office space. It also plans to hire a CFO and a legal lead.
The message behind those moves is clear. Kamino is trying to move beyond its identity as a Solana-based DeFi lending protocol and reposition itself as an institutional on-chain credit marketplace.
Weisz does not come from crypto. At Yieldstreet, now renamed Willow Wealth, he was involved in distributing more than $6 billion in alternative investments, working with firms including Goldman Sachs, Carlyle, KKR, and Ares. Explaining the New York move, he said, "Being in New York puts Kamino at the intersection of asset managers, distribution platforms, and institutional capital."
Kamino still makes most of its money from lending spreads
According to DeFiLlama data cited in the source article, Kamino’s revenue currently comes from four main lines of business.
- Lending spreads: This is the biggest contributor. Depositors earn yield, borrowers pay interest, and Kamino keeps the spread between borrowing rates and deposit rates. In Q2 2026, gross lending interest revenue was about $10.29 million. Roughly $8.85 million was paid to depositors, leaving Kamino with around $1.44 million.
- Liquidity vault fees: These are management fees from automated liquidity management strategies. In Q2 2026, the category generated about $390,000, of which around $130,000 went to Kamino.
- Liquidation penalties: When collateral falls below liquidation thresholds, liquidators close positions and Kamino takes part of the penalty. This brought in about $11,200 in Q2 2026, a quarter the article describes as relatively calm.
- Origination fees: One-time fees charged when loans are issued. This line was zero in Q2 2026.
Across those categories, Kamino posted about $10.69 million in total protocol revenue in Q2 2026. After payouts to depositors and LPs, net protocol revenue, described in the source as something close to gross profit at the protocol level, came to about $1.58 million.
Revenue has fallen sharply from its earlier peak
The revenue trend is central to the KMNO debate. Kamino’s protocol revenue dropped from a peak of $36.67 million in Q4 2024 to $10.69 million in Q2 2026, a decline of more than 70%.
The source ties that drop closely to weaker activity across the broader Solana ecosystem. In that framing, Kamino’s current earnings remain largely a function of lending demand inside the SOL economy.
PRIME is the first live RWA business with real scale
Kamino’s RWA transition has only one real product in market so far: PRIME.
PRIME was launched with Figure Technologies and Hastra. It uses Figure’s blockchain-based home equity loans as collateral and allows depositors to earn yield backed by RWAs. After 107 days live, deposits had topped $600 million.
That figure is large relative to Kamino’s existing balance. Out of $1.4 billion in total assets, PRIME accounts for more than 40%, and it reached that level from zero in roughly three and a half months.
The source also says Forward Industries, or FWDI, described there as a Solana-listed entity, and Galaxy Digital, or GLXY, are using Kamino’s infrastructure to manage tokenized equity and U.S. Treasury positions.
In practical terms, that means Kamino’s asset side is widening from crypto-native collateral such as SOL, USDC, and mSOL to tokenized traditional assets.
KMNO still lacks a direct value-capture path
For KMNO holders, the issue is not only whether Kamino can expand into RWA products. The harder question is whether protocol income can actually flow through to the token.
Right now, KMNO is used for governance voting and staking for points boosts. The article says there is no public fee distribution, buyback, or burn mechanism that passes protocol revenue to token holders.
It compares that setup to ARB: revenue exists, but value capture has not caught up. Whether Weisz will push for tokenomics changes is presented as the key variable in deciding if KMNO can move from being treated as a "SOL Beta" trade to an independently priced asset.
Valuation sits in the middle of the DeFi lending pack, based on current earnings
KMNO is currently priced at about $0.025, with roughly 5.5 billion tokens in circulation. That implies a circulating market capitalization of around $130 million to $140 million. With a total supply of 10 billion tokens, its fully diluted valuation is about $170 million to $250 million.
Using Q2 2026 net protocol revenue of roughly $1.58 million, or about $6.32 million on an annualized basis, the token trades at around 27x to 40x FDV-to-net-revenue.
The source describes that multiple as mid-range among DeFi lending protocols. But it also argues that a re-rating depends on the quality of the RWA business, not just on asset growth.
If PRIME can lift net income in a meaningful way, valuation could be reassessed. If the RWA business only expands TVL without thickening net revenue, the current valuation has little obvious support for a higher multiple.
The comparison with Aave comes back to one question: who gets the fees?
For comparison, the article puts Aave’s FDV-to-annualized-revenue multiple at about 15x to 20x. It notes that Aave has already built fee capture through GHO and staking yield through the Safety Module.
Kamino, by contrast, still needs to solve the basic question of fee ownership before it can argue for similar valuation treatment.
The source ends with two conditions it sees as necessary if KMNO is to evolve from a "SOL Beta" token into an independently priced RWA asset:
- PRIME’s RWA revenue must meaningfully exceed the contribution from traditional crypto lending spreads, proving the transition is economically useful.
- Governance must introduce some form of fee capture or buyback mechanism, proving that protocol income can reach token holders.