Galaxy launches 2 stablecoin vaults on Kamino

Galaxy has expanded its onchain lending business to Solana with two live stablecoin vaults on Kamino, adding separate USDC and USDT strategies managed through Galaxy Curation.

Galaxy said on Sept. 17 that its curation team will decide which Kamino lending markets the vaults can enter, control exposure limits and monitor market conditions using the risk framework employed in its institutional lending business.

Separately, Kamino confirmed the launch, describing the products as actively managed lending vaults that generate yield from borrower activity across its Solana credit markets. Neither announcement set a guaranteed return or fixed APY.

Galaxy brings its curation model onto Solana

Galaxy Curation started in July with stablecoin strategies built on Morpho and distributed to institutions through Fireblocks Earn. The Kamino launch puts the same curation model on a second blockchain and introduces direct exposure to Solana lending markets.

Galaxy’s July launch described curation as a system for applying institutional credit controls to onchain lending while keeping deposited assets at the protocol level. Curators decide which lending markets qualify, how much capital can enter each one and when those allocations need to change.

For Kamino, Galaxy has launched one USDT configuration and one USDC configuration. Both are described by Galaxy as moderate-risk strategies, though they have different mandates.

The USDT vault takes the more selective approach. Galaxy says it is designed to prioritize capital preservation through exposure to liquid and established Kamino lending venues.

The USDC vault permits a larger set of collateral markets in pursuit of higher lending yield. Galaxy describes the design as involving expanded collateral exposure and wider market participation, which means its risk profile is not identical to the USDT product.

Galaxy explicitly warns that both products remain exposed to market, smart-contract and liquidity risks. The company does not describe either vault as principal-protected.

Eduardo Bermudez, Galaxy’s director of trading, said the company built the curation business around the view that institutions should not have to change their operating model to use onchain yield products.

“Extending that to Kamino brings the same principle to Solana,” Bermudez said.

Vault rules control where depositor funds can move

Kamino’s vault system lets a curator set eligible reserves, allocation weights and hard exposure caps. Its documentation says users deposit one asset into a vault and receive vault shares whose value changes as interest accrues from underlying lending markets.

The curator does not manually execute every individual movement of capital. Kamino’s infrastructure handles allocation and rebalancing based on the strategy instructions set by the curator, while the resulting activity remains visible onchain.

Galaxy will therefore control the lending mandate, while Kamino provides the smart contracts and execution infrastructure.

Kamino documents controls covering allocation weights, reserve restrictions, management fees, performance fees, minimum deposits and exposure settings. The Galaxy announcement did not publish a fixed vault APY, management fee, performance fee or maximum deposit amount.

Liquidity conditions can affect withdrawals. Kamino’s documentation says vault redemptions first use idle liquidity and funds available from lending reserves. A withdrawal can enter a queue when enough immediately redeemable capital is unavailable.

Michael Weisz, Kamino’s CEO, said Galaxy’s lending experience is being applied directly through the protocol’s infrastructure. He described the arrangement as bringing institutional capital and risk controls into the same onchain system, a company characterization that does not remove the lending and smart-contract risks disclosed for users.

The USDC vault has another distribution route through Yield.xyz. Galaxy said the integration lets users access that strategy beyond Kamino’s own interface, while the USDT vault announcement did not identify a comparable external distribution channel.

Galaxy builds on a $1.4 billion lending operation

Galaxy’s latest reported financial figures provide the basis for the institutional lending experience referenced in the vault announcement.

Its Q2 results showed an average loan book of $1.438 billion for the three months ended June 30, up 1% from the previous quarter. The company served 1,741 trading counterparties, compared with 1,691 in Q1.

Galaxy ended the quarter with $7.1 billion in combined assets under management and assets under stake. Its Global Markets business generated $49 million of adjusted gross profit during the quarter.

The curation expansion follows Galaxy’s July launch of the Galaxy Onchain Financing Rate, or GOFR. That product lets institutional borrowers face Galaxy directly while Galaxy routes financing across several onchain lending protocols.

Galaxy’s GOFR materials list Kamino alongside Aave, Morpho and Spark among the lending venues monitored for the program. Galaxy committed $100 million of its own equity as first-loss capital for GOFR, a structure separate from the new Kamino vaults.

As of Sept. 13, Galaxy displayed indicative GOFR rates of 4.40% for USDC and 4.00% for USDT. Those rates belong to the GOFR financing program and should not be treated as yields for the newly launched Kamino vaults.

The company has been adding other Solana-based institutional products during 2026. As earlier coverage of Galaxy’s Solana fund launch reported, Galaxy and State Street introduced the SWEEP tokenized cash-management fund on Solana in May.

Galaxy has since used Kamino in its onchain financing operations and collateral markets. Recent coverage of institutional tokenized assets noted that tokenized GLXY shares issued through Superstate had already been accepted as collateral on Kamino.

Kamino reports more than $20 billion in originated loans

Kamino describes itself as Solana’s largest credit platform and said in the Galaxy announcement that it had originated more than $20 billion in loans without bad debt to lenders. The protocol said it had processed more than $650 billion in cumulative transaction activity.

Kamino’s figures are company-reported operating statistics. Independent DeFi metrics use different definitions.

Current DefiLlama data tracks Kamino Lend at approximately $1.33 billion in total value locked and just over $1 billion in active loans. The service records roughly $211 million in cumulative protocol fees.

Kamino’s announcement describes its credit platform as having roughly $2 billion in AUM. That figure should not be treated as interchangeable with DeFiLlama’s TVL because platform AUM and the data provider’s locked-value calculation cover different accounting definitions.

The protocol’s institutional activity has expanded beyond conventional crypto-backed loans. Three days before Galaxy’s launch, Kamino introduced lending vaults using tokenized SPY, QQQ and Nvidia shares supplied through Kraken’s xStocks platform.

As recent tokenized-stock market coverage reported, Kamino held approximately $41.7 million of tokenized-stock DeFi deposits in early September, placing it behind Uniswap V4 in that measured category.

Kamino appointed former Yieldstreet co-founder Michael Weisz as CEO on Sept. 15 and announced plans to build a New York operation focused on institutional finance. Coverage of Kamino’s U.S. expansion reported that the company plans to recruit staff across finance, legal, compliance, product and business development.

For the new Galaxy products, the next changes will occur through ongoing curation. Galaxy can modify market allocations and exposure limits as lending conditions change, while Kamino’s infrastructure executes the approved strategy onchain.

Galaxy has not published a target amount for deposits into either vault or a deadline for reaching a specific asset level. Its Sept. 17 announcement states that both the USDC and USDT vaults are already live.