Kamino Expands into New York, Taps Yieldstreet Co-Founder as CEO

Kamino, a Solana lending protocol, is expanding its reach in the financial sector by establishing a New York headquarters. To lead this push, Kamino has named Michael Weisz, co-founder of Yieldstreet (now Willow Wealth), as its new CEO. Weisz brings significant experience to the role, having deployed over $6 billion alongside firms like Goldman Sachs and Carlyle.

Kamino's plan is to extend its lending model to tokenized real-world assets, providing markets where investors can finance or use those assets as collateral after they are moved on-chain. The company has already seen success with its PRIME market, which uses Figure's blockchain-based home equity loans as collateral and has attracted over $600 million in deposits within 107 days of launch.

Kamino has processed more than $650 billion in transactions over the past four years, and with Weisz at the helm, it plans to build closer ties with Wall Street firms. The company is looking at roughly 20,000 square feet of office space in New York and plans to hire a chief financial officer and head of legal.

Weisz believes that being in New York will put Kamino 'at the intersection of the asset managers, distribution platforms, and institutional capital that will define the next phase of on-chain finance.' Tokenization has become one of Wall Street's biggest bets on crypto technology, with Citi projecting the market for tokenized securities could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030.