Kamino

About

Kamino Finance is a Solana-native DeFi protocol that unifies lending, borrowing, and providing of liquidity into a single unified DeFi product suite, enabling users to earn yield on supplied assets through multiple strategies. Kamino’s infrastructure supports money-market lending and single-asset vaults backed by aggregated market positions and optimized allocation strategies.

Yield API currently supports Kamino staking, lending pools, and vaults, allowing users to generate yield on Solana by allocating to a specific market or vault which optimizes allocations to the lending markets on behalf of depositors.

Kamino Lending

Kamino’s lending markets — built on a modular credit infrastructure known as K-Lend — allow users to supply assets to earn interest while enabling borrowers to take loans against collateral. Lenders earn yield from borrower interest rates which are dynamically priced via Kamino’s interest rate curves and risk model.

Key features of Kamino Lending:

• Unified liquidity market — assets share efficient liquidity rather than isolated pools, increasing utilization and yields
• Soft liquidations — Kamino uses adaptive liquidation mechanics to reduce sudden debt unwinds, instead gradually balancing the collateral and debt exposure

Users depositing into Kamino Lending need to spend additional ~0.0315 SOL for account creation which is return upon the full exit from the lending position. Yield starts accumulating immediately following the deposit and accrues continuously as interest payments are generated by borrowers.

Kamino Vaults

Kamino Vaults are automated single-asset lending and allocation strategies — similar in spirit to “yield aggregator” products — that take user deposits and automatically optimize them across Kamino’s lending markets* with sophisticated risk mandates and curator strategies.

These vaults deliver yield by:

• Allocating deposits across multiple lending markets (e.g., stablecoins, SOL derivatives) with preset risk/return profiles
• Continuously rebalancing positions to capture rate changes and maximize returns

Upon deposit, users receive receipt vault tokens (kvTokens), which represent their proportional share of the vault and accrue value over time via price per share increase.

Across both Kamino Lending and Vaults, yield begins accruing immediately upon deposit, and positions can typically be withdrawn without lock-ups or unbonding delays.

Kamino KMNO Staking

In addition to Kamino vaults and lending, Yield API also supports Kamino staking. By staking KMNO tokens, users are able to boost KMNO rewards which are generated by their lending and vault positions.

User's earned KMNO rewards do not show up on the individual yield, instead they show up as a claimable balance on the solana-kamino-stakingyieldId. The amount of KMNO can be tracked via the balance endpoint by passing the user address and the Kamino staking yieldId.

Pending Actions

Claim rewards

Users will be able to claim their KMNO reward tokens using the CLAIM_REWARDS pending action on the rewards balance. Note, the KMNO tokens become claimable after the end of each reward season.

Considerations

Account creation requirement

On the first deposit into a lending pool, users incur a small Solana account creation cost ~0.0315 SOL that is returned upon the exit from the position.

Deposit caps in lending pools

Each lending pool has a supply side capacity limit. Users are not able to deposit additional assets once the max capacity is reached. The max capacity, current supply, and remaining capacity are surfaced in the YieldDto within the state object.

Transaction types and signing

When we return a Solana transaction for a user to execute, it is provided as an unsigned, base64-encoded blob.

• Unsigned transactions are encoded in base64
• They are versioned Solana transactions (i.e., VersionedTransaction, typically v0)

Example (TypeScript) — decode base64 unsigned tx, sign, and send (using Solana Kit)

This example uses:

• Solana Kit for RPC
• @solana/web3.js to deserialize/sign a VersionedTransaction (this is the most common pattern for “base64 unsigned v0 tx” payloads)

import { createSolanaRpc } from "@solana/kit";
import { VersionedTransaction, Keypair } from "@solana/web3.js";

// 1) RPC client

const rpc = createSolanaRpc("https://api.mainnet-beta.solana.com");

type UnsignedTxPayload = {
  unsignedTransactionBase64: string; // base64-encoded, unsigned VersionedTransaction
};

// Client-side signing with a browser wallet ---
// Pseudocode: your wallet adapter / Wallet Standard should provide signTransaction(tx)

export async function signAndSendWithWallet(
  payload: UnsignedTxPayload,
  wallet: { signTransaction: (tx: VersionedTransaction) => Promise<VersionedTransaction> }
) {
  const txBytes = Buffer.from(payload.unsignedTransactionBase64, "base64");
  const tx = VersionedTransaction.deserialize(txBytes);


// Wallet signs the transaction
const signedTx = await wallet.signTransaction(tx);



const signedB64 = Buffer.from(signedTx.serialize()).toString("base64");
const signature = await rpc
  .sendTransaction(signedB64, { encoding: "base64" })
  .send();

  return signature;
}

KMNO incentive rewards

Kamino is currently in the Season 5 of the initiative to reward users for supplying liquidity on Kamino. The season 5 ends on March 7th, 2026. During the season, users who deploy into positions with active KMNO rewards start accruing the rewards in real-time based on their deposit value and KMNO staking boost.

• At the end of the season, users can choose between:
  • Early claim: claim a portion of vested KMNO immediately, forfeiting the remaining amount to the community bonus pool.
  • Full vest: wait until the six-month vesting period concludes to receive the full amount plus a proportional share of the bonus pool. The early claim penalty decreases progressively throughout the vesting period, allowing users to claim at any time based on preference.

List of Integration IDs

Kamino Staking

Kamino Lending

Kamino Vaults