Key points

  • Kamino appointed Yieldstreet co-founder Michael Weisz as chief executive and is establishing a headquarters in New York City.
  • The Solana-based lender plans to expand markets for tokenized real-world assets and hire an institutional team spanning legal, compliance, finance and product.
  • Transaction volume and deposit figures cited in the announcement are company claims; customer adoption and regulatory execution remain the key tests.

Kamino has appointed Yieldstreet co-founder Michael Weisz as chief executive and is establishing a New York headquarters, giving the Solana-based lending protocol a physical base for its planned expansion into U.S. institutional markets. The company announced the leadership change on September 15 and said Weisz will oversee work with asset managers, financial platforms and regulated service providers.

The move is more than an executive appointment. Kamino is positioning its existing crypto lending markets as infrastructure for tokenized real-world assets, including credit products that can be financed or used as collateral after moving on-chain. Building a New York team places the protocol closer to the institutions, legal advisers and regulators that would need to support those products.

Related reporting: DeFi Development Corp adds 55,491 SOL and opens $300M CHAD program

A private-markets background

Weisz previously co-founded Yieldstreet, now Willow Wealth, an alternative-investment platform that Kamino says deployed more than $6 billion. His experience centers on distribution and private markets rather than running a blockchain protocol. Kamino co-founder Marius Ciubotariu presented that background as complementary to the protocol's credit and liquidity technology, arguing that institutional adoption depends on connecting assets, investors and regulated pathways.

Kamino said it is evaluating roughly 20,000 square feet of New York office space and plans to hire across finance, product, legal, compliance and business development. CoinDesk reported that a chief financial officer and head of legal are among the intended hires. The announcement did not give a headcount target, hiring timetable or budget for the expansion.

From tokenization to usable collateral

Tokenizing an asset creates a blockchain-based representation, but it does not automatically create a functioning market. Investors still need custody, legal ownership records, compliance processes, pricing, liquidity and ways to borrow against the asset. Kamino's stated strategy is to provide those credit and liquidity layers so tokenized securities and loans can be used rather than merely issued.

One example is Kamino's PRIME lending market, developed with Figure Technologies and Hastra. CoinDesk reported that the market uses blockchain-based home-equity loans as collateral and had attracted more than $600 million of deposits within 107 days, citing the company. Kamino also said its infrastructure is used for tokenized equity and U.S. Treasury positions. These examples show the direction of travel, though they do not by themselves establish the credit quality, liquidity or regulatory treatment of every market built on the platform.

Scale claims need operational proof

Kamino describes itself as Solana's largest credit protocol and says it has processed more than $650 billion in cumulative transaction volume over four years. CoinDesk separately cited DeFiLlama data showing about $1.4 billion of assets on the protocol. Transaction volume can include repeated activity and should not be read as revenue, unique customer assets or institutional commitments.

For institutions, the next evidence will be practical: which regulated counterparties join, how legal and compliance responsibilities are divided, whether disclosed assets can be reliably valued and liquidated, and how much real demand emerges for borrowing against tokenized collateral. The New York headquarters and Weisz's appointment give Kamino a leadership structure for that effort, but successful expansion will depend on products, permissions and counterparties that were not fully detailed in the announcement.

The strategy also exposes Kamino to a different risk profile. Serving professional asset managers requires controls for counterparty risk, sanctions, disclosures and operational resilience alongside smart-contract security. The September 15 announcement sets the ambition and identifies the executive leading it; measurable adoption and regulatory execution will determine whether the planned Wall Street bridge becomes durable market infrastructure.

Sources

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