Kamino Hires Yieldstreet Co-Founder Michael Weisz as CEO, Opens New York Headquarters for U.S. Institutional Push
Solana’s largest lending protocol is putting a traditional finance veteran in charge. Kamino has appointed Yieldstreet co-founder Michael Weisz as chief executive officer as the protocol builds a New York headquarters and pushes into the United States institutional market around credit, collateral and tokenized assets.
The announcement, issued on September 15, positions Weisz to oversee the U.S. expansion, work directly with institutional asset managers and financial platforms, and assemble a New York-based team spanning finance, product, legal, compliance and business development.
From retail alternative assets to onchain credit
Weisz arrives with more than two decades in fintech and private markets. He co-founded Yieldstreet, now Willow Wealth, a platform that deployed more than 6 billion USD across multiple asset classes and served more than 500,000 individual investors. During his tenure the firm worked alongside Goldman Sachs, Carlyle, KKR, Ares, Fortress and StepStone, according to Kamino’s announcement.
That resume matters for a protocol trying to sell decentralized lending rails to Wall Street. Kamino is betting that the skills required to package institutional credit for a new investor base translate directly to tokenized onchain markets, where legal, compliance, operational, credit and liquidity infrastructure remains a prerequisite for large allocators.
“Being in New York puts us at the intersection” of asset managers and institutions, Weisz said in the company’s release. Putting assets onchain creates opportunities around collateral, settlement and distribution, he argued, but firms still require the full stack of institutional scaffolding around the technology.
CoinDesk reported that Kamino is considering roughly 20,000 square feet of office space and intends to recruit a chief financial officer and a head of legal. Kamino’s formal announcement confirmed it is evaluating New York City office space without specifying its size.
A lending machine that already handles real-world assets
The institutional pitch rests on markets Kamino is already running. Its PRIME market, built with Figure Technologies and Hastra, pipes yields generated by Figure’s lending business into Solana-based DeFi. Figure has said its Democratized Prime business supplies yields from more than 1 billion USD per month in onchain loan originations, including pools tied to home-equity lending, with Kamino serving as the exclusive onchain credit and lending partner for PRIME since December 2025.
Kamino now says PRIME deposits surpassed 600 million USD within 107 days of launch, a company-reported figure that has not been independently audited.
Tokenized equities have entered the same framework. Forward Industries confirmed in December 2025 that eligible non-U.S. holders of tokenized FWDI shares can post the stock as collateral on Kamino and borrow stablecoins, with Superstate’s Opening Bell system powering the tokenized securities and acting as registered transfer agent. Galaxy’s second-quarter Solana report documented a comparable use case, noting that tokenized GLXY shares became available as Kamino collateral through Superstate in April 2026, with more than 17 million USD of Superstate-issued assets sitting as borrowable collateral at the time of reporting.
Kamino Lend held approximately 41.7 million USD of tokenized-stock DeFi TVL in a recent measurement, ranking second behind Uniswap V4’s 59.1 million USD according to Token Terminal data.
Protocol scale, token disconnect
DefiLlama currently places Kamino’s total value locked near 1.43 billion USD, all on Solana, with roughly 1.02 billion USD in active loans. The tracker lists cumulative protocol fees around 249 million USD and cumulative revenue near 50.3 million USD. Kamino separately claims more than 650 billion USD in cumulative transaction volume over four years, more than 20 billion USD in originated loans, no user bad debt or security incident, and more than 30 independent audits plus four formal verifications, figures the company has not provided independent audit coverage for.
The protocol’s scale stands in sharp contrast to its governance token. KMNO showed little price reaction to the leadership news, trading close to 0.025 USD on September 16 for a market capitalization of roughly 138 million USD, a fraction of the value locked in the lending markets the token governs.
Timing against a shifting U.S. policy backdrop
Kamino framed its expansion partly around improving American digital-asset policy, citing the GENIUS Act stablecoin framework, regulatory treatment of bank crypto activities and congressional work on market-structure legislation in its announcement.
One piece of that backdrop shifted hours after the release. The U.S. Senate voted 49-50 against advancing the CLARITY Act market-structure bill, dealing a setback to the legislative timeline Kamino referenced. The protocol’s leadership appears to be betting that the directional trend toward regulated tokenized markets survives any single legislative stumble, with institutional credit infrastructure demand driven as much by state-level frameworks and bank engagement as by a single federal bill.
The Solana context also favors the move. The network’s real-world asset value reached roughly 2.7 billion USD in June, according to RWA Foundation data, spanning tokenized funds, credit products and securities. Kamino’s push to pair a regulated New York entity with onchain lending rails places it among the strongest-positioned protocols to capture institutional flows if that growth curve continues.
For Weisz, the assignment inverts his Yieldstreet playbook: instead of bringing private-market yields to retail investors through a web platform, he is bringing institutional credit infrastructure to blockchain rails, with a 1.4 billion USD Solana lending protocol as the foundation.
kamino already leads solana lending volume, add weisz plus a manhattan credit team and it becomes a live bid for tokenized private credit. the blackrock pipeline writes itself
the pipeline maybe, but tokenized private credit needs monthly attestations nobody on solana wants to produce yet. weisz knows that grind from willow
20k sq ft in manhattan for a solana lending protocol would have been unthinkable in 2022. if weisz lands even one allocation from his goldman or kkr contacts the whole sector reprices
weisz running the same playbook at kamino he used at yieldstreet, cept now the collateral sits onchain where anyone can audit it. the ny office is the tell, they want the blackrock meetings
those blackrock meetings need a compliance team that speaks sec, which is literally what he is hiring for in new york. smart hire tbh
compliance staff are the actual product here. allocators do not diligence pitch decks, they diligence people with sec scar tissue, and that is exactly the team weisz is hiring in NY
the sec scar tissue line is exactly right. allocators want a ny entity and named humans they can actually sue before touching onchain credit
sueable humans in a ny entity is genuinely institutional checklist item one. the chain part was always easy, the liability part never was
a compliance team that speaks sec is the whole product. the collateral was already auditable, the blackrock meetings were the missing piece
20k square feet of manhattan office for a solana protocol, the pitch really is we are a bank now. auditable onchain collateral is the actual differentiator tho
auditable collateral only matters if allocators learn to read a chain explorer. hiring people who can translate is literally the moat
20k square feet to sell a solana lending vault to pensions lol. still cheaper than the fines if theyd tried it from a dao
two decades in private markets and he picks a solana lending protocol. says more about where the fees are heading than any pitch deck could
fees and jurisdiction. you cant sell onchain credit to a connecticut pension from a dev dao, the ny address is the product
the connecticut pension line is dead on. weisz hiring legal and compliance first for the ny office tells you exactly which allocator they are chasing
took a yieldstreet guy to run a solana lending protocol, wild timeline. weisz does know credit tho, and kamino needs exactly that for the institutional push
yieldstreet had its share of regulatory headaches years ago lol but ok, institutional money doesnt care as long as the compliance team sits in manhattan
yieldstreet still deployed 6b through those headaches and kept its licenses. that survival record is precisely what kamino is paying for
kept its licenses is the key phrase. half the fintech survivors from that era are gone, weisz selling that track record to pensions is the smart play
those regulatory headaches are exactly why legal and compliance are the first hires. nobody opens a NY HQ for degen yield farming
6b deployed at yieldstreet vs kamino current tvl, thats the gap he was hired to close. credit spreads dont care which chain the collateral sits on
NY headquarters plus a CeFi veteran CEO is the clearest sign yet that Solana lending wants real allocators instead of degen farmers. Smart hire imo.
weisz deployed 6b across yieldstreet asset classes and now pitches tokenized credit to the same allocators. the wall st to solana revolving door spins faster every quarter
revolving door or not, 500k investors and 6b deployed at willow is a rolodex kamino could never buy. the door spinning is the whole point of the hire
two decades at yieldstreet then jumping to a solana lending protocol. weisz clearly sees tokenized credit as the next leg and the ny hq backs it up