Kamino, one of Solana's largest lending protocols with $1.4 billion in assets under management, named Yieldstreet co-founder Michael Weisz as chief executive and announced plans to open a New York headquarters, marking an effort to bridge decentralized finance with Wall Street.
Weisz will lead the expansion from approximately 20,000 square feet of planned office space in New York. Kamino also said it intends to hire a chief financial officer and a head of legal. Weisz co-founded the alternative investment platform Yieldstreet, now operating as Willow Wealth, which deployed more than $6 billion alongside firms including Goldman Sachs, Carlyle, KKR and Ares.
"Being in New York puts Kamino at the intersection of the asset managers, distribution platforms and institutional capital that will define the next phase of on-chain finance," Weisz said.
Kamino is extending its lending model beyond crypto collateral into tokenized real-world assets, including blockchain-based home equity loans. Its PRIME lending market, built with Figure Technologies and Hastra, uses Figure's blockchain-based home equity loans as collateral. Deposits in the PRIME market surpassed $600 million within 107 days of launch, the company said.
Nasdaq-listed Solana treasury firm Forward Industries and digital asset manager Galaxy also use Kamino's infrastructure for tokenized equity and U.S. Treasury positions, Kamino added.
Kamino said it has processed more than $650 billion in cumulative transactions over four years.
Tokenization of traditional assets such as stocks, bonds and funds has become one of Wall Street's leading bets on crypto technology. Citi has projected the tokenized securities market could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030, driven by banks and asset managers seeking faster settlement, round-the-clock trading and new ways to deploy assets as collateral.
The New York expansion reflects a broader shift as tokenization moves past simply placing assets on blockchains. Lending and collateral markets are developing around those tokenized assets, creating another avenue for DeFi platforms to partner with traditional financial firms.
"The hardest part is rarely creating the asset," Weisz said. "It is building the infrastructure that meets distribution and asset managers where they are."
