Kamino Review

How Kamino scores in crypto lending

This entry rates Kamino Lend, the lending program behind Kamino's Solana borrowing markets, in our lending ranking. The basis is desk research of Kamino's documentation and the klend GitHub repository, checked on November 1, 2026. No position was opened. The category uses five criteria, each marked 0 to 10 and weighted equally, as set out in our ratings methodology.

The overall score is the plain average: (10 + 4 + 7 + 6 + 9) ÷ 5 = 36 ÷ 5 = 7.2. The total is unchanged, but two marks moved on this pass. Liquidation terms fell from 10 to 7, because the figures the old mark rested on (a 10% close factor and a 0.1% to 10% penalty scale) are no longer in the docs. Governance and timelock rose from 3 to 6, after the curator documentation began stating the multisig owner and a 12-hour timelock for Kamino's main market.

Strongest criteria: fees and audits

Fee disclosure (10)

Kamino's fee page gives the protocol spread as a table. It is 11% on SOL and 15% on USDC, USDT, mSOL, JitoSOL, bSOL, wETH and tBTC in the SOL/BTC Market, and 20% on USDC in the JLP and Altcoins markets. The spread is a share of interest, not of principal. It then states that there are no deposit, withdrawal or origination fees, and that a borrower's only costs are interest and any liquidation penalty. The rubric credits a stated absence of fees as disclosure, and this page names both what is charged and what is not. The mark covers Kamino's own markets; markets run by outside curators set their own settings.

Audit disclosure (9)

The security page lists 18 external audits by Sec3, OtterSec, RX, Offside Labs and Certora, grouped by program and dated. Kamino Lend alone has reports from RX (July 2023), OtterSec (September 2023), Certora (February 2025) and Sec3 (February 2025). Four formal verifications follow, the latest an OtterSec verification of Kamino Lend dated October 6, 2025, plus an Ackee fuzzing report from September 2025. The bug bounty runs on Sherlock with rewards of up to 1,000,000 USDC. The mark stays below Aave's 10 because the archive is a third of the size and the newest full Lend audit dates from early 2025. Audits check code at a point in time and do not insure deposits.

Weakest criteria: licence and governance

Licence & code openness (4): a deficiency with an end date

The security page calls Kamino Lend "open source since its inception". The LICENSE file in the klend repository says otherwise in legal terms. It is the Business Source License 1.1, with StroudGlobal S.A. as licensor and "None" as the additional use grant, so the code may be copied and modified but not used in production. It converts to GPL-2.0-or-later on November 17, 2027. The rubric places delayed-open licences mid-table, the same 4 given to Aave and Euler.

Governance & timelock (6): partly disclosed

The market-ownership guide now states that all Kamino-deployed markets are owned by Squads v4 multisigs, with a 12-hour timelock on the SOL/BTC Market and shorter timelocks on satellite markets. A separate planning page describes two roles. The market owner changes settings through the multisig and timelock, and an emergency council can restrict market activity at once but cannot restore it. That is a stated delay with a named mechanism, which the old mark of 3 did not have. It stops at 6 for three reasons: twelve hours is a short warning window, the satellite markets' delays are not given as numbers, and the docs do not say who holds upgrade authority over the Solana programs themselves or what the multisig's signer threshold is.

Liquidation terms (7): numbers for structure, examples for the penalty

Each liquidation can close up to 20% of a position's debt. Above the market's insolvency-risk threshold, typically 95% LTV, the close factor rises to 100%. The liquidator's bonus starts at a per-reserve minimum, rises with the depth of the breach to a per-reserve maximum, and is capped near 100% LTV so it cannot push a position into bad debt. The docs illustrate this with a reserve at 75% liquidation LTV, a 2% minimum and an 8% maximum, but they label these as example values. The Multiply page gives maximum LTVs for three pairs: 75% for SOL against USDC, 90% for JitoSOL against SOL in eMode, and 67% for JLP. Per-reserve liquidation thresholds and bonus ranges are not listed. This is a measured gap, not an unchecked one. Our guide to reading a DeFi lending market shows where those values sit.

What the score does not cover

• Rates and yields. Variable and fixed borrow rates move with utilization and terms, and were not measured.
• Track record. Kamino reports no bad debt since November 2023, including the February 5–6, 2026 SOL drop with $19.36 million of collateral seized. These are the company's own figures and sit outside the five criteria.
• No insurance fund. Kamino Lend has no protocol-level insurance fund; lenders in a reserve would absorb any bad debt.
• Curator vaults and markets. Earn vault fees and markets run by outside curators carry their own settings and are not scored here.

Kamino vs Venus Protocol and Euler

Venus Protocol scores 7.6, four tenths above Kamino. It leads on licence (9 for BSD-3-Clause against 4) and governance (9 against 6), while Kamino leads on fees (10 against 5) and liquidation terms (7 against 5). Euler follows at 7.0. The two share a 4 for licence; Kamino's fee mark is two points higher and its liquidation mark one point higher, against Euler's one-point leads on governance (7) and audits (10).

Who this rating suits

The score suits Solana borrowers who want to know what they pay before they borrow: the spread, the absence of other fees and the close factor are all on the page. Readers who need an open-source licence today, a long timelock on parameter changes, or published penalty ranges for each reserve should weigh the three lower marks. Borrowing against volatile collateral can end in liquidation; this rating describes published documentation and is not advice to lend or borrow.