Kamino Names Michael Weisz CEO as Solana RWA Lending Takes Center Stage

Kamino’s New CEO Signals a Shift From Tokenization to Credit

Kamino, the largest borrowing protocol on Solana, has made a leadership change that underscores a broader pivot in the digital-asset industry. On Tuesday, the platform appointed Michael Weisz as chief executive and unveiled plans to establish an institutional team in New York City. The move is not just a reshuffling of titles; it is a bet that the next phase of growth for tokenized assets will be defined not by how much value is issued on-chain, but by how much of that value is actually used. That question is especially acute on Solana, where the total value of real-world assets, commonly known as RWAs, has climbed past $4 billion across more than 350,000 wallets. RWAs are on-chain representations of traditional financial instruments such as private credit, Treasuries, home-equity loans, and other yield-bearing products. They have become one of the most talked-about corners of crypto, promising to bring legacy finance onto blockchain rails. But Kamino’s new strategy is rooted in a more skeptical observation: tokenization alone does not create liquidity. The protocol has decided that the next stage of growth must come from converting Solana’s tokenized value into continuous demand for lending, rather than letting it sit stagnant in wallets and vaults. With Weisz at the helm and a New York-based institutional team taking shape, Kamino is effectively arguing that the first question — can RWAs be tokenized? — has already been answered. The harder question is whether those assets can be leveraged, borrowed against, and woven into the day-to-day machinery of credit markets. That is the challenge Weisz has been hired to solve.

A Fintech Veteran Moves From Private Markets to DeFi

Weisz is not a crypto-native founder. He co-founded Yieldstreet, the alternative-investment platform originally known as Willow Wealth, where he helped scale distribution for private-market investments. That background matters. Yieldstreet was built to open private-market opportunities to a broader range of investors, and Weisz spent years navigating the regulatory, legal, and distribution complexities that come with bringing nontraditional assets to market. In a LinkedIn post announcing his move, Weisz was careful to frame tokenization as only the starting point. For the market to function, he argued, it also needs liquidity, credit, distribution, and infrastructure. Kamino echoed that message in its own announcement on X, saying Weisz would lead the protocol into a “next chapter of institutional growth” and help expand Kamino into the U.S. market. The institutional playbook is still taking shape, but Kamino has been explicit about the pillars: distribution, legal and compliance, asset-manager operations, credit, and liquidity. The company is currently building a New York team that will draw on professionals from finance, law, product, compliance, and business development. The logic is straightforward. Asset managers, financial platforms, and capital providers want to work with teams that understand their language and operate in their time zones. Being physically closer to those institutions, Kamino believes, will make it easier to move from pitch to execution. Weisz’s appointment is a signal that Kamino understands the gap between building a protocol and building a business. Technology may be decentralized, but distribution, trust, and relationships still require a human touch. His job is to bring both.

Market Size Is Not Market Utility: What the RWA Data Really Shows

On paper, Solana’s RWA market looks impressive. The network has attracted billions in tokenized value and a large wallet base. But market size does not automatically translate into market utility. Data from the year-long period ending August 18 paints a more complicated picture. Solana accounted for 32% of on-chain RWA spot trading and 47% of all RWA transactions, yet it controlled only 12% of the total RWA market capitalization. In dollar terms, roughly $14.7 billion moved through Solana out of $46 billion in industry-wide RWA trading activity during that period. The median RWA trade on Solana was just $29, compared with $70 elsewhere. Even more telling, BlackRock’s $741 million BUIDL fund — one of the most prominent tokenized asset products in the market — did not execute any trades over Solana. These figures suggest that much of Solana’s RWA activity is happening at the margins, driven by smaller transactions and a broad base of users rather than by large institutional flows. A FinTech Journal report in July examining RWAs built on Ethereum found a similar dynamic: tokenization does not inherently provide liquidity, and there is no guarantee that higher asset values will correlate with higher trading activity. The report focused on Ethereum and did not address Solana directly, so the comparison is directional rather than direct, but the underlying theme is consistent across networks. Galaxy Research has been blunt about the disconnect. “Capability now runs ahead of adoption,” the firm wrote, adding that the second half of 2026 will test whether that gap closes. According to Galaxy, much of Solana’s tokenized value is still not being put to work. Lending markets, in particular, have yet to turn the emerging pool of assets into a sustainable source of borrowing demand. In other words, the raw material is there, but the credit engine has not caught fire.

The Figure Test Case and the Gap Between Supply and Debt

One of the clearest examples of both the opportunity and the challenge is PRIME, a liquid-staking product tied to the on-chain lending framework used by Figure, the fintech company known for home-equity lending. Figure established an RWA consortium on Solana in December 2025 and selected Kamino as its exclusive partner for on-chain credit and lending services. Figure says it has issued more than $19 billion in on-chain loans and controls 70% of the RWA private-credit market. PRIME, for its part, generates yield from pools that include Figure’s home-equity loans, giving the product a direct link to real borrower cash flows. That makes PRIME one of the more substantive RWA experiments on Solana, because its returns are anchored to actual repayment streams rather than purely speculative token economics. Yet Kamino’s August data show just how far credit utilization still has to go. RWAs made up 17.2% of Kamino Lend supply, or about $426.1 million. But total RWA and liquid-staking-token debt was below $3 million. That is a striking imbalance. The protocol is holding hundreds of millions of dollars in RWA collateral, but borrowers are only tapping a tiny fraction of it. PRIME also reported $13.6 million in net outflows, and another asset, ONyc, overtook it as the top RWA asset by supplied value. The outflows do not necessarily mean PRIME is failing, but they do suggest that investor enthusiasm for RWA yield products can be fickle, especially when the underlying borrowing market is still shallow. For Kamino, the challenge is not just attracting more RWA deposits. It is creating the conditions for those deposits to become productive collateral. That means building credit infrastructure, developing underwriting standards, and convincing borrowers that Solana is a reliable place to take out loans. The Figure partnership is a test case for all of it.

A Network Upgrade Expands What Solana Can Handle

While Kamino works on its institutional strategy, the Solana network itself is also becoming more accommodating to complex financial activity. On Tuesday, Solana activated Transaction V1 on mainnet, a technical upgrade that raises the maximum transaction size from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes — roughly 3.3 times more space, according to Cryptopolitan’s reporting. The change might sound incremental, but it has meaningful implications for institutional users. Larger transactions can carry more complex instructions, support bigger multisig operations, and handle proof-heavy workloads within a single atomic transaction rather than forcing them to be split across multiple steps. For a lending protocol courting asset managers and capital providers, that kind of capacity matters. Institutional transactions often involve multiple signatures, compliance checks, and data-heavy attestations that need to be processed together. Giving those operations more room to fit into one transaction reduces friction and makes the network more practical for real-world financial use. Still, infrastructure upgrades do not guarantee adoption. Capacity is a necessary condition for growth, but not a sufficient one. The Solana network can handle more sophisticated transactions today than it could a week ago, but that alone will not create borrowers or lenders. Kamino’s real test remains whether asset managers, lenders, and borrowers start routing meaningful credit through Solana. That is the gap Weisz has been brought in to close. The upgrade simply removes one more technical excuse for staying on the sidelines.

The Real Test: Turning $4 Billion in Tokenized Assets Into Loans

Kamino’s institutional push is, at its core, a bet on the idea that tokenized assets will only matter if they can be integrated into the broader financial system. Distribution, legal and compliance, asset-manager operations, credit, and liquidity are not glamorous parts of crypto. They are, however, the parts that determine whether a protocol becomes a real market or remains a technology demo. Weisz’s background suggests Kamino understands this. At Yieldstreet, he helped build a platform that connected investors to private-market assets by navigating the messy, relationship-driven world of alternative finance. At Kamino, he is being asked to do something similar in reverse: connect a decentralized lending protocol to the institutions that could one day provide billions of dollars in borrowing demand. The opportunity is significant. Solana has more than $4 billion in RWA value already on-chain, and Kamino is the largest borrowing protocol on the network. If even a small percentage of those assets were borrowed against, it would transform the economics of Solana DeFi. But the numbers so far suggest that the pipeline is still being built. The gap between supply and debt, the small median trade sizes, and the lack of institutional activity all point to a market that is early, fragmented, and still searching for product-market fit. Galaxy Research’s warning that “capability now runs ahead of adoption” is a useful frame. The technology can do more than the market is using it for. Whether that changes in the second half of 2026 will depend on people like Weisz, on partnerships like the one with Figure, and on whether the infrastructure upgrades now going live can help close the distance between tokenization and real credit. Kamino’s bet is that the pieces are finally in place. The next few months will show whether the market agrees.