Kamino Finance Debuts Token With 70% Drop In Price

Kamino Finance, Solana’s largest lending and liquidity protocol according to total value locked (TVL), suffered a fierce market rejection to its new token, KMNO.

Launched today, the KMNO token opened the day changing hands for $0.11 only to plummet minutes later, stabilizing around the $0.03 mark. That’s a whopping 70% drop as it went live, signaling the market isn’t entirely convinced of its utility.

Today’s airdrop marks a continuation of a variety of new liquidity vaults opening on Kamino.

Liquidity vaults offer decentralized exchange users access to funds that have been deposited in Kamino. The protocol automates the process, returning fees and rewards to depositors.

LP Tokens

Kamino’s main differentiator is that it tokenizes users position’s into LP tokens dubbed kTokens, which can then be used as collateral in Kamino Lend. This adds composability to the protocol, allowing for tokens to move between protocols, powered through Kamino’s liquidity vaults.

Most liquidity vaults live on Solana exchange Jito, although Kamino recently unveiled new vaults on SolBlaze, a liquid staking protocol on Solana with $318 million in TVL. The project added 250,000 in KMNO tokens and 20 million BLZE, or roughly $20,000, in incentives.

And Kamino has been adding incentives all throughout April, favoring Wormhole, Tensor, and Zorksees holders.

Users that have been taking advantage of KMNO’s liquidity vaults on Jito have been outperforming SOL by just over 1% in recent months, as per Kamino’s dashboard. Providing JitoSOL-SOL liquidity is paying out 2.52% in APY, and records $25 million in TVL with weekly volumes exceeding $138 million.

According to DefiLlama, TVL on Kamino Finance has dropped significantly from its late March peak. It’s down 28% from $1.437 billion on March 31 to $1.048 billion today.

Controversial Airdrop Announcement

Kamino’s airdrop has not been exempt from controversy.

After it announced the details of its airdrop in early March, outrage ensued from the community since token eligibility would be tied to future allocations purely by the total number of tokens they could accumulate by the end of the month when Kamino would take the all-important snapshot.

“We hear you,” posted the team on X on March 11, overhauling the mechanism and taking a more favorable turn towards their longer-term users, dubbed “OGs.”

On March 20, the team explained how they would additionally reward early adopters, allocating the so-called OGs 0.5% of the total supply, and increasing the total community allocation to 7.5%.