Kamino is Solana’s largest lending venue, and its position panel tells you almost everything you need: how much you have borrowed relative to your collateral (current LTV), the line where liquidation starts (liquidation LTV), and the blended rate you earn or pay. Learning how to use Kamino is mostly learning to read that panel. You can lend through curated Earn vaults or market reserves, borrow against SOL or liquid staking tokens, or open a leveraged Multiply position. This guide explains each path with a SOL-collateral example, as of October 2026, and shows when Multiply turns yield into liquidation.
Key takeaways
- The official app is app.kamino.finance; its top navigation shows Earn, Borrow, Multiply and Swap.
- Kamino measures risk as current LTV rising toward liquidation LTV, the reverse of a “health factor” that falls.
- Liquidations close up to 20% of debt per event, with a dynamic bonus paid from your collateral.
- Multiply loops a yield-bearing asset in one transaction; it loses money whenever borrowing costs outrun the asset’s yield at your chosen leverage.
- Keep spare SOL for priority fees and account rent, or transactions will fail.
What Kamino is used for (and what changed with V2)
Kamino started in 2022 as an automated liquidity manager and grew into a lending protocol (Kamino Lend). Its V2 release, launched in 2025, split the product into two layers. The market layer allows many lending markets, each pairing specific collateral and debt assets with their own oracles, LTVs, rate curves and caps; alongside the main market sit isolated markets for assets such as Jupiter’s JLP token or tokenised real-world assets. The vault layer adds curated Earn vaults: single-asset deposits that professional curators allocate across markets under a stated mandate. At V2’s launch those curators included Steakhouse Financial, Re7 Labs, Allez Labs and MEV Capital.
The KMNO token and Kamino’s points programme exist mainly to boost rewards and for governance; treat any points as an uncertain extra, not part of your expected outcome. If you are comparing Kamino with other Solana protocols, our roundup of Solana DeFi projects covers the wider landscape.
Setting up: wallet, SOL for fees, the real app
- The address. Kamino’s own documentation lists app.kamino.finance as the app. Enter it manually and save it; fake Solana dapps often arrive through airdropped “claim” tokens or reply-guy links on X.
- A Solana wallet. Phantom, Solflare and Backpack all connect. Our Phantom wallet review covers transaction previews and security settings worth enabling.
- SOL for fees and rent. Opening a lending position creates on-chain accounts (an “obligation” that records your position and token accounts for new assets), each needing a small rent deposit in SOL. A new SPL token account, for example, locks about 0.002 SOL. Add priority fees during busy periods. Leaving 0.05–0.1 SOL unspent is a common cushion.
- Failed transactions. In congestion, Solana transactions can expire without landing. A failed transaction costs only its fee, but do not resend repeatedly at high priority without checking your position first; one of the earlier attempts may have landed.
How to use Kamino to lend
There are two ways to supply assets, and they carry different risks.
| Route | Where in the app | Who decides where your money goes | What you take on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Earn vault | Earn | A named curator, within a mandate (often labelled conservative, balanced or aggressive) | Curator judgement plus the risks of every market the vault uses |
| Supply to a market reserve | Borrow (the market’s asset list) | You choose the market and asset | That market’s collateral, oracle and liquidation set-up |
Earn vault steps: open Earn, choose the asset (USDC, SOL and others), open a vault, read its curator, strategy description and the markets it allocates to, enter an amount and deposit. You receive vault shares that grow if the vault earns interest. The displayed APY is a trailing figure and changes with borrowing demand; we do not quote it.
Direct supply steps: open Borrow, select the market (main market first unless you have a reason to use an isolated one), pick the asset, choose supply, enter an amount, approve in your wallet. Supplied assets can also become collateral.
Withdrawals can be delayed when utilisation is very high: if borrowers have taken most of a reserve’s liquidity, there may not be enough left for every lender to exit at once until rates pull in repayments or new deposits.
How to borrow on Kamino without getting liquidated
Borrowing happens in the same market view. Supply collateral, then choose an asset to borrow and enter an amount. The panel shows three numbers you must understand:
- Current LTV = risk-adjusted debt value / collateral value. Kamino’s docs note that “borrow factors” inflate the debt value of riskier borrowed assets.
- Max LTV, the most you can borrow when opening or increasing a loan, shown as your borrow limit.
- Liquidation LTV, a higher line. Cross it and liquidation can happen at any moment, with no grace period.
A SOL-collateral example
Round, hypothetical figures; real LTVs differ per market and asset. You supply 100 SOL at $150 ($15,000) and borrow 6,000 USDC. Assume a liquidation LTV of 80% for SOL in this market.
| SOL price | Collateral value | Current LTV | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| $150 | $15,000 | 40% | Comfortable |
| $120 | $12,000 | 50% | Fine |
| $100 | $10,000 | 60% | Watch closely |
| $85 | $8,500 | 70.6% | Little room left |
| $75 | $7,500 | 80% | Liquidatable |
Here SOL can roughly halve before liquidation. Borrow 9,000 USDC instead and the same 80% line arrives at $112.50, a 25% fall. Interest also accrues on the USDC debt, nudging LTV up even if SOL stands still.
What a Kamino liquidation costs
According to Kamino’s documentation, each liquidation event can close at most 20% of the debt, and further rounds follow if you stay above the line. If LTV reaches the market’s insolvency-risk threshold (typically 95%), the full position can be closed at once. The liquidator’s bonus, taken from your collateral, is dynamic: it starts at a reserve’s minimum at the liquidation LTV and rises with the breach, up to a reserve maximum. In the docs’ own example reserve, that runs from 2% to 8%. To cut risk, repay part of the loan or add collateral long before the line, using the repay or deposit options on your position.
If you also borrow on Ethereum, our guide to borrowing on Aave explains how Aave’s health factor expresses the same idea the other way round.
Multiply and looping: leverage in disguise
Multiply automates a loop: deposit a yield-bearing asset such as a SOL liquid staking token, borrow against it, buy more of the asset, deposit again. Kamino does it in a single atomic transaction using a flash loan, so you either get the full position or nothing. Correlated pairs such as an LST against SOL use an eMode with higher LTVs, which the docs say allows up to 10x.
The economics follow Kamino’s own formula: net yield = (asset yield x leverage) − (borrow rate x (leverage − 1)). At 3x, that is three times the staking yield minus twice the SOL borrow rate. The position turns negative as soon as the SOL borrow rate exceeds 1.5 times the staking yield, and at higher leverage the tolerance shrinks further. SOL borrow rates can jump when demand to borrow SOL surges, so a position that looked positive at opening can bleed daily.
Kamino prices SOL LSTs in these positions using the stake pool’s exchange rate rather than the market price, so a brief market discount on an LST does not by itself push LTV up. That reduces one liquidation trigger but not the others: sustained negative carry, a fault in the stake-rate data, or a problem with the LST itself. For how LSTs work, see our Solana liquid staking guide. Multiply on non-correlated pairs (for example, a volatile token against USDC) is plain leveraged directional exposure and liquidates on price moves like any margin trade. Kamino’s long/short tools sit in the same category.
Kamino liquidity vaults
Kamino’s original product manages concentrated liquidity positions on Solana DEXs for you. You deposit one or both tokens, and the vault picks a range, collects fees and rebalances when price moves. “Automated rebalancing” sounds protective, but each rebalance realises the divergence between the two tokens, so these vaults still suffer impermanent loss, and volatile pairs can lose value even while earning fees. The vault also charges fees, shown on its page. Read the strategy description and the pair’s volatility before depositing, and check whether the vault is still offered in the current app, as Kamino has shifted emphasis toward lending.
Risks specific to Solana lending
- Oracles. Kamino uses its own Scope aggregator, drawing on feeds such as Pyth and Switchboard. A stale or wrong price can liquidate healthy positions or let bad debt build.
- LST stress. Large unstaking waves can stretch LST redemption queues and borrowing demand at the same time.
- Isolated market and curator risk. Isolated markets and Earn vaults depend on someone’s parameter choices. Read who curates them and what collateral they accept.
- Network congestion. When you most need to repay, transactions may fail or require higher priority fees.
- Signatures. Solana wallets ask you to approve whole transactions rather than token allowances. Read the wallet’s simulation of balance changes before signing, and see our DeFi guides hub for approval and revocation guidance across chains.
FAQ
What is Kamino Finance?
Kamino Finance is a Solana DeFi protocol offering lending and borrowing markets (Kamino Lend), curated Earn vaults, leveraged Multiply positions and automated liquidity vaults. It is governed using the KMNO token. It is non-custodial: you connect a Solana wallet and interact with on-chain programs rather than depositing with a company.
What is the difference between LTV and liquidation LTV on Kamino?
Current LTV is your debt divided by your collateral value. Max LTV caps how much you can borrow when you open or increase a loan. Liquidation LTV is a higher threshold; once your current LTV crosses it, liquidators can repay part of your debt and take collateral plus a bonus. Keep a wide gap between the two.
Is Kamino Multiply risky?
Yes. Multiply is leverage. On correlated pairs the main danger is the borrow rate rising above what the leveraged yield can cover, which erodes the position; on non-correlated pairs price moves can liquidate it. Higher leverage narrows both margins. Treat displayed net yields as current snapshots, not forecasts.
How do Kamino Earn vaults work?
You deposit a single asset, such as USDC, into a vault run by a named curator, who allocates it across Kamino lending markets according to a published mandate. You receive shares whose value rises with interest earned. Your risk depends on the markets the curator chooses, so read the vault’s allocation before depositing.
Crypto is volatile and risky; this is education, not financial advice. Do your own research.
