Kamino's Plan To Make Tokenized Assets Actually Useful | Michael Weisz

Kamino’s central thesis is that tokenization will matter only when it gives assets practical utility, particularly the ability to borrow against them. Michael Weisz describes Kamino as financial-market infrastructure connecting asset managers with platforms that already serve investors, rather than as a consumer marketplace. Its core contribution is credit and liquidity for on-chain assets: holders could borrow against investments without selling them, while potentially earning yield on the assets they retain. Weisz says Kamino has the largest tokenized-equities borrow market.

Kamino wants brokerages, banks, fintechs, exchanges, wealth platforms, and retirement platforms to offer on-chain products through their existing customer experiences. Weisz cited $100 million deposited into Kamino vaults by Binance wallet users without leaving Binance. A planned API and front end would let distribution partners choose which assets to offer and which customers qualify, while retaining their own branding and customer experience. The intended flywheel is to bring attractive strategies to platforms, draw users and liquidity, and use that scale to support more assets and distribution.

Weisz sees a fragmented path today for asset managers, who must navigate decisions about tokenization, chains, pricing, valuation, and related operational needs; he described roughly 25 people being involved in the process. Kamino plans to coordinate guidance with law firms and other trusted partners, set service requirements, and identify preferred providers, rather than build tokenization services itself. The customer-facing friction can also be substantial: Weisz illustrated a Schwab customer with $100,000 who wants to put $50,000 into a 3x-leveraged product, a process he said could involve 30 steps. A simplified API-enabled experience could instead present a liquid yield product while the platform controls access.

Kamino’s four stated pillars are user journey, regulatory and compliance, asset-manager lifecycle, and credit and liquidity; Weisz said credit and liquidity is the pillar the company currently has. The model depends on asset managers handling underwriting while Kamino supplies infrastructure, technology, and software. For example, a venture fund could be tokenized and offered through a platform such as Kraken, then used as collateral for a Kamino loan. Weisz says tokenization can help establish shared records of ownership and claims, but it does not by itself solve the difficulties of custody, transferability, liquidation, and enforcement that make private assets hard to lend against.

That distinction limits which assets can support liquid borrowing markets. Kamino does not plan to lend against venture funds in the next six months, Weisz said, because quarterly or less frequent NAV reporting can leave valuations too volatile. He expects on-chain credit to expand first into areas such as aircraft leasing, consumer finance, point-of-sale finance, trade finance, receivables, commercial lending, and factoring. Better NAV data, transparency, and pricing could eventually support private equity and venture assets; assets with less reliable pricing may need to trade at a discount. Kamino intends to prioritize regulated managers and proven assets, and not extend credit where pricing is unreliable.

The aim, Weisz stressed, is to make assets more useful, not to encourage extreme leverage. He gave borrowing $40–$50 against a $100 allocation in a large income fund as an example. Borrowing against LP positions could also let institutions rebalance or invest in a new fund vintage without selling existing stakes; he described a hypothetical wealth-management lender charging 5–6% against LP investments earning more than 10%. Kamino’s current model is a spread on interest, while Weisz expects a share of net interest income to be part of its revenue in five years.

Weisz estimated the opportunity at $50 trillion and said 100 million Americans are served by a dozen or fewer distribution platforms, making integration with those platforms central to Kamino’s plan. He also described a longer-term opportunity involving $100 trillion in assets, ranging from highly liquid holdings to assets that currently lack pricing. He cited iCapital, with over $1 trillion in assets under advisement or management, as a potential beneficiary if credit against liquid private assets enables wealth platforms and wirehouses to reinvest or buy more assets. Weisz said Solana’s speed, scale, and tested operation make it a strong fit for financial markets, while expansion to other chains will depend on asset-manager and distribution-partner needs; he cited zero bad debt across more than $20 million in originated loans.