Kamino vs MarginFi: Comparing Two Solana DeFi Lending Protocols

Bottom line: Kamino is Solana's largest lending market, built as one unified pool with risk-tiered assets; MarginFi (mrgnlend) pairs a cross-collateral global pool with isolated pools for riskier tokens — and is mid-transition into a broader platform called Project 0, so check its current status before you deposit.

Where this fits: not a general DeFi intro

If you haven't used Solana DeFi before, start with our general primer on getting started with Solana DeFi — it covers wallets, swapping, and the baseline risks of any DeFi app. This article assumes you already understand those basics and want to compare two specific, named lending protocols head-to-head.

What Kamino and MarginFi actually are

Kamino Finance launched in 2022 as an automated liquidity-management tool for Orca "Whirlpool" positions, then added its own lending market — K-Lend — in 2023. By 2024–2025 it had grown into Solana's largest money market by deposits, ahead of other lenders including MarginFi. It's governed by holders of the KMNO token, which launched via a "Genesis" airdrop in April 2024.

MarginFi (the lending app itself is called mrgnlend) is a non-custodial, over-collateralized lending protocol built by Mrgn Labs and live since mid-2023. It was historically one of Solana's largest lenders, peaking at roughly $800M+ in deposits during 2024. Since then its lending TVL has declined sharply over 2024–2025 — a decline that predates, and is separate from, the more recent Project 0 shift described below.

How each protocol works

Kamino: one pool, tiered by risk

K-Lend is a pooled ("peer-to-pool") money market: lenders deposit assets and receive interest-bearing receipt tokens, while borrowers post SPL token collateral and draw against it up to a set loan-to-value (LTV) limit. Two design choices define it:

• eMode gives borrowers a higher LTV when both their collateral and their loan are drawn from a correlated group of assets — for example, liquid-staking SOL derivatives used as collateral to borrow plain SOL — since that price relationship is tighter than an arbitrary asset pair.
• Asset tiers — General, Isolated Collateral, and Isolated Debt — let Kamino's Risk Council list higher-risk, long-tail tokens without exposing the main SOL/USDC/BTC pool to contagion if one of them runs into trouble.

Price feeds run through Kamino's own oracle-aggregation layer (Scope), which sources from Pyth and other providers.

MarginFi: cross-collateral by default, isolated for the risky stuff

mrgnlend's flagship design is the Global pool: every asset you deposit counts as collateral for every asset you borrow, all inside one "marginfi account" tracked by a single health factor. That's more capital-efficient than juggling separate positions if you hold several blue-chip assets (SOL, USDC, ETH, JitoSOL, mSOL). For long-tail SPL tokens — historically including assets like BONK and JTO — MarginFi instead uses isolated pools, where a token can be borrowed but can't be used as collateral for the rest of the account. That's the same contagion firewall Kamino builds with its isolated tiers, implemented a different way.

Supported assets, at a glance

Exact asset lists, LTVs, and interest-rate curves change as each protocol's risk council votes on new listings — always check the live app (app.kamino.finance, app.marginfi.com) rather than treating this table as current.

Risk factors to weigh

Liquidation mechanics

Both protocols are over-collateralized: you must post more value than you borrow, and if the market moves against you, your position becomes liquidatable.

• Loan-to-value (LTV) vs. liquidation threshold: the LTV caps how much you can initially borrow against collateral; the liquidation threshold — set higher than the LTV — is the point at which a position becomes eligible for liquidation. Kamino commonly runs LTVs around 70–80% with a liquidation threshold a few points above that, varying by asset; MarginFi expresses the same idea through a "health factor" that must stay above zero.
• Liquidation bonus: liquidators are paid a discount on seized collateral (commonly in the 5–10% range across Solana money markets generally) as the incentive to act quickly — which is also the cost to you if you're liquidated.
• Because both run on Solana, liquidations execute within seconds of being triggered, so thin safety margins matter more than they would on a slower chain.

Smart-contract risk (real incidents, not hypotheticals)

Audits reduce risk; they don't remove it. Both protocols illustrate that:

• Kamino has been reviewed by six firms (OtterSec, Sec3, Offside Labs, Certora, Ackee Blockchain, RX Security) across roughly 20 audits, and runs a $1.5M bug bounty on ImmuneFi — one of the largest on Solana. Certora's formal-verification pass found a precision-loss ("rounding") bug in the exchange-rate math that could theoretically let a user redeem slightly more collateral than they deposited; Kamino confirmed it wasn't exploitable at the scale of any real Solana token and shipped a fix, published in its March 2025 audit report.
• MarginFi has been audited by OtterSec and runs its own bug-bounty program. In September 2025, a researcher at Asymmetric Research privately disclosed a flash-loan vulnerability that could have let an attacker borrow funds through a crafted account transfer and never repay them, with roughly $160M in deposits exposed at the time of discovery. MarginFi shipped a patch before it was exploited; no user funds were lost.

Neither history proves a protocol is "safer" going forward. What it shows is that both have real attack surface, both caught serious issues through responsible disclosure rather than after a loss, and neither is risk-free.

Protocol / organizational risk — MarginFi's Project 0 shift

This is the fact most likely to be out of date by the time you read it, so treat the date stamp seriously. Starting in late 2025, Mrgn Labs began integrating the marginfi lending market into a new, broader platform called Project 0 — a cross-protocol margin layer meant to aggregate marginfi alongside other Solana lenders (including Kamino and Drift) under one account, with its own token planned as part of the rollout (announced for a phased 2025–2026 launch, already pushed back once). MarginFi's own announcement describes Project 0 as "powering" the marginfi program rather than replacing it, and the marginfi app continues to operate — but a protocol mid-rebrand and mid-token-rollout carries extra near-term uncertainty (points programs changing, UI moving, incentive structures shifting) on top of ordinary smart-contract risk. Kamino has no comparable organizational transition underway as of this writing.

Which one fits your situation?

Neither protocol is objectively "better" — they trade off differently:

• If you want the deepest liquidity and the widest range of collateral types, Kamino's larger unified pool and isolated-tier system currently offers more scale and more supported assets.
• If you hold a handful of blue-chip assets and want maximum capital efficiency across them without managing separate positions, MarginFi's Global-pool cross-collateral design is built for exactly that.
• If you're depositing a long-tail or newly listed token, check whether it sits in an isolated tier or pool on either protocol — that changes what it can and can't be used for.
• If you're risk-averse about organizational change, weigh MarginFi's ongoing Project 0 transition against Kamino's more settled status.

Whichever you choose, start with an amount you can afford to lose, monitor your health factor or LTV, and re-verify current rates, supported assets, and protocol status directly on each project's own app before depositing.

FAQ

Q: Is Kamino or MarginFi bigger? A: Kamino has been Solana's largest lending market by deposits since roughly 2024. MarginFi was also a top-three Solana lender at its 2024 peak, but its lending TVL has declined significantly since — a decline that mostly predates its more recent transition toward Project 0. Check DefiLlama or each protocol's own dashboard for current figures — TVL moves daily and estimates vary by source.

Q: Can I use the same collateral on both protocols? A: Many blue-chip assets (SOL, USDC, ETH, and popular LSTs like JitoSOL and mSOL) are supported on both, but exact asset lists, LTVs, and isolated-tier placements differ and change as each protocol's risk council votes on new listings — check the live app before assuming an asset is supported.

Q: Has either protocol lost user funds to a hack? A: Not that has been publicly confirmed as of this writing. Both have had vulnerabilities responsibly disclosed and patched — Kamino's rounding bug (Certora, reported March 2025) and MarginFi's flash-loan bug (Asymmetric Research, September 2025) — with no reported user losses in either case. That track record can change; audits and bug bounties reduce risk but don't eliminate it.

Q: What is Project 0, and does it replace MarginFi? A: Project 0 is a new cross-protocol platform from MarginFi's team (Mrgn Labs) that aggregates marginfi alongside other Solana lenders under one account, with its own token planned as part of the rollout. According to MarginFi's own announcement, Project 0 "powers" the marginfi program rather than shutting it down, but the transition is ongoing — check marginfi's official docs for the current status before depositing.

Sources

• Kamino Docs — product overview and Lend litepaper: https://kamino.com/docs
• Kamino Docs — Security audits: https://kamino.com/docs/security/audits
• Kamino Docs — Bug bounty program (ImmuneFi): https://kamino.com/docs/security/bug-bounty
• Certora — "Securing Kamino Lending" (precision-loss fix via formal verification, March 2025): https://www.certora.com/blog/securing-kamino-lending
• marginfi Docs — Introduction: https://docs.marginfi.com/introduction
• Asymmetric Research — "Threat Contained: marginfi Flash Loan Vulnerability" (September 2025): https://blog.asymmetric.re/threat-contained-marginfi-flash-loan-vulnerability/
• Project 0 — "Introducing Project 0: Product, Timeline, and Token": https://blog.0.xyz/blog/introducing-project-0
• DefiLlama — Kamino TVL: https://defillama.com/protocol/kamino
• DefiLlama — marginfi TVL: https://defillama.com/protocol/marginfi