Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://kamino.com/docs/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
Risk in a lending protocol comes down to one question: can every lender get their tokens back? Two things can prevent this: insolvency (bad debt from loans that couldn’t be liquidated) and illiquidity (all tokens are borrowed and no one is repaying). Kamino’s risk framework is designed to prevent both.
Risk Dimensions
Insolvency Risk
Insolvency occurs when a borrower’s position becomes unhealthy (LTV exceeds the liquidation threshold) and the liquidation cannot be profitably executed — typically because the collateral token lacks sufficient market liquidity to be sold without excessive slippage. The resulting bad debt is socialized among lenders.
Kamino mitigates insolvency risk through:
Liquidity Risk
Liquidity risk arises when borrowing demand exhausts the available supply in a reserve, reaching 100% utilization. Lenders cannot withdraw until borrowers repay or new supply arrives. This does not cause financial loss — in fact, it produces exceptionally high interest rates for lenders — but it temporarily restricts withdrawals.
Kamino mitigates liquidity risk through:
- Interest rate curves calibrated to spike when utilization exceeds target levels, creating economic pressure for repayment
- Daily caps that limit the rate at which borrows can accumulate
- Real-time utilization monitoring with alerting
Systemic Risk
Systemic risk emerges when multiple assets on the protocol are correlated — a broad market downturn triggers liquidations across many positions simultaneously, potentially overwhelming liquidation infrastructure or liquidity. Kamino monitors token correlations and systemic exposure and uses E-Mode caps and supply caps to limit concentrated exposure.
Token Onboarding
Every asset listed on Kamino undergoes a 5-dimension risk assessment before it can be used as collateral or borrowed:
- Oracle Pricing Risk — reliability and redundancy of the asset’s price feeds
- Smart Contract Risk — audit history, maturity, and battle-testing of the token’s underlying contracts
- Depeg Risk — for pegged assets, the probability and impact of losing the peg
- Counterparty Risk — governance decentralization, holder concentration, and trust assumptions
- Market Risk — volatility, liquidity, and price impact dynamics
Based on this assessment, each asset is classified into one of three tiers:
| Tier | Description | Implications |
|---|
| General Asset | Meets all risk criteria | Full cross-margin eligibility, higher LTV limits |
| Isolated Collateral | Elevated risk in one or more dimensions | Can only be used as collateral in isolated mode |
| Isolated Debt | Elevated borrowing risk | Can only be borrowed in isolated mode |
Battle-Tested Track Record
Kamino has operated since November 2023 with $0 bad debt across every market condition — including 5 significant stress events that tested the liquidation infrastructure and risk parameters under real-world conditions.
| Event | Date | Collateral Seized | Bad Debt |
|---|
| Flash Analysis | Feb 16–18, 2025 | $4.1M | $0 |
| Market Correction | Feb 24 – Mar 2, 2025 | $22.1M | $0 |
| SOL/ETH Crash | April 6–7, 2025 | $16M | $0 |
| October Correction | Oct 10, 2025 | $20M | $0 |
| SOL -18% Crash | Feb 5–6, 2026 | $19.36M | $0 |
February 2026 Stress Event — Case Study
The most severe test of Kamino’s risk framework occurred on February 5–6, 2026, when SOL dropped 18% (from $92 to $76), ETH fell ~15% (from $2,148 to $1,832), and JLP declined ~10% (from $3.83 to $3.43) over 48 hours.
Scale of liquidations:
- 55,649 individual liquidation events
- 30,030 wallets affected
- $19.36M in collateral seized
- $0 bad debt generated
Market breakdown:
| Market | Liquidation Events | Collateral Seized |
|---|
| Main | 44,665 | $12.79M |
| JLP | 10,560 | $6.47M |
| Bitcoin | 214 | $20K |
| Fartcoin | 67 | $47K |
| JTO | 4 | $12.6K |
Monthly Risk Reports
Since early 2025, Allez Labs has published comprehensive monthly risk reports to the Kamino governance forum — over 14 reports to date. These reports cover:
- Protocol-level metrics: Total supply, debt, TVL, transaction volumes, liquidation counts
- Market-by-market analysis: Supply, borrow, and utilization trends across all markets
- Stablecoin and SOL market analysis: Composition shifts, rate dynamics, LST trends
- Vault performance: TVL, curator activity, user flows across Earn Vaults
- Stress testing scenarios: Instantaneous price shock modeling at -10%, -20%, -30%, -40%, -60% levels
- User behavior analysis: Wallet activity, transaction patterns, concentration metrics
The reports provide a public, auditable record of Kamino’s risk posture over time. Anyone can review the historical data and methodology.
View all risk reports on the governance forum →
Continuous Monitoring
Risk management is not a periodic activity — it runs continuously. The following metrics are tracked in real-time:
- Utilization rates per reserve (approaching 100% triggers interest rate escalation)
- LTV distributions across all active positions (clustering near liquidation thresholds indicates elevated risk)
- Oracle staleness and cross-provider deviation (signals potential oracle issues)
- Cap utilization (supply, borrow, and daily caps approaching limits)
- Liquidation-at-risk metrics (what percentage of positions would be liquidated at various price shock levels)
- Vault allocation changes (unusual curator behavior)
Anomalies in any of these metrics trigger review. The response escalation path ranges from parameter adjustments to emergency measures like auto-deleverage.
Insurance Fund
Kamino Lend does not operate a protocol-level insurance fund. No bad debt has ever been incurred — the $0 bad debt track record reflects the effectiveness of the risk framework and protocol safeguards rather than a backstop fund.
At the product level, Lending Vaults offer first-loss capital (insurance pools) where curators lock their own capital as a buffer. This is a vault-level feature managed by individual curators, not a protocol-wide mechanism.
