Kamino, the largest credit protocol on Solana, has named Michael Weisz, co-founder of the private credit platform Yieldstreet, as its chief executive and opened a New York headquarters for a push into US institutional markets and tokenized real-world assets. The company announced the move on Monday, and it marks one of the most direct attempts yet to bridge a DeFi protocol with Wall Street distribution.
Who Weisz is and what he brings
Weisz co-founded Yieldstreet, a retail alternative investment platform that grew into one of the largest US private credit marketplaces, and ran it through its main expansion years. In a statement, he framed the move as the third act of the same problem. He said he has worked on finding differentiated assets, distributing them through a regulated platform, and now rebuilding the infrastructure underneath both, and that Kamino is where those experiences come together.
His argument for New York was blunt. Being there puts the company next to the asset managers, financial platforms, regulated service providers and capital providers that will shape the tokenized asset market, he said. The plan is to build a New York team that works directly with regulators, asset managers and capital providers rather than serving them from a distance.
Today, tokenization has proven that assets can move on-chain, that is just the first step. Representing an asset on-chain creates new possibilities for distribution, collateral, and settlement, Weisz said in the announcement.
What Kamino actually is
Kamino started as a liquidity and lending protocol on Solana and has grown into the network’s dominant credit venue. The company says it has processed more than $650 billion in cumulative transaction volume, passed more than 30 independent security audits with zero incidents, and recorded no bad debt to users across several market cycles. Its KMNO token trades around $0.20, and the protocol’s scale has made it a bellwether for Solana DeFi activity.
The institutional pitch rests on that record. Weisz said the decision to join was driven in part by the platform’s track record, which matters when the target customers are asset managers who ask hard questions about custody, audits and counterparty risk before they move a single dollar.
The real-world asset bet
The strategic shift is toward lending against tokenized real-world assets. Roughly $4 billion in RWAs already sits on Solana by AInvest’s count, spanning tokenized treasuries, private credit and other instruments. Kamino’s thesis is that representing an asset on-chain is only the first step, and that the real value comes from the layers around it: trusted distribution, legal and compliance pathways, asset lifecycle operations, and credit and liquidity against the asset.
Weisz said Kamino is building those layers as one institutional system that asset managers, financial platforms and regulated service providers can connect into. The goal is to broaden access to investment opportunities and let investors borrow against assets that were previously illiquid, which is essentially the Yieldstreet model rebuilt on public blockchain rails.
Company founder Marius Ciubotariu, who moves to a product-focused role, called the change an acceleration of Kamino’s product foundation and said the next generation of financial markets will require more than bringing assets on-chain.
Why it matters for Solana
Solana has spent two years courting institutional issuers, and tokenized treasuries and money market funds on the network have grown steadily. But lending infrastructure has lagged. Most RWAs on the network sit in custody or in passive yield products, with little ability to borrow against them on institutional terms. A credit venue run by someone with a regulated private credit background is an attempt to close that gap.
The timing is also telling. The CLARITY Act, the US market structure bill that would draw clearer lines between SEC and CFTC jurisdiction, failed a Senate cloture vote 49-50 on Tuesday, and industry executives told Cointelegraph they expect regulators to fill the gap with rulemaking in the meantime. Companies like Kamino are positioning for that outcome: build the compliance and distribution layer now, so that when rules firm up, the plumbing is already in place.
Competitors are moving the same direction. Coinbase, Securitize, Ondo and BlackRock’s BUIDL fund have all pushed tokenized assets deeper into traditional channels, and AInvest noted that Kamino’s focus on credit facilities for the $4 billion Solana RWA base puts it in direct competition with those platforms for institutional flow. The difference is that Kamino is building from a live lending venue with four years of on-chain history rather than starting from a wrapper around existing funds.
What to watch
The announcement gave no timeline for the New York team’s size or for specific product launches. The test will be whether regulated asset managers actually route lending business through a Solana protocol, and whether Kamino can build the legal wrappers institutions require without losing the composability that made the protocol useful in the first place. Weisz’s hiring suggests the company thinks both are possible at once.
There is precedent for skepticism. Several DeFi protocols have hired traditional finance executives in recent years, and few of those moves produced the institutional volume the announcements promised. The difference here is that Kamino already has the scale on-chain and is hiring for distribution, not credibility, which is a harder problem but a more concrete one.
For Solana’s broader institutional case, the hire lands in the same week the network’s stablecoin and payment infrastructure drew fresh attention, and it gives the ecosystem a named executive with regulated credit experience at its largest lending venue. Whether that converts into loan volume against tokenized assets will show up in Kamino’s on-chain data within a few quarters.