Kamino, the Solana lending protocol that allows users to lend crypto assets or borrow against them, has appointed Yieldstreet co-founder Michael Weisz as chief executive officer. The move pairs a traditional alternative-investment operator with one of Solana's largest money markets as the protocol pushes deeper into tokenized real-world-asset lending.

The hire was reported on September 15, 2026 by CoinDesk's Krisztian Sandor, who named Weisz as chief executive. No first-party appointment announcement from Kamino was available at press time, so the appointment and the executive's mandate remain attributable to that single report.

A New York Base and Executive Build-Out

According to CoinDesk, the appointment coincides with Kamino establishing a New York headquarters. The company is evaluating roughly 20,000 square feet of office space and planning to hire a chief financial officer and a head of legal. These are stated plans, not completed hires or an executed lease.

Weisz framed the location choice around institutional access. "Being in New York puts Kamino at the intersection of the asset managers, distribution platforms and institutional capital that will define the next phase of on-chain finance," he said in a statement reported by CoinDesk. Hiring for financial and legal functions is the kind of operational groundwork institutional counterparties commonly look for in an on-chain venue, aligning the build-out with the audience Weisz described.

Kamino's Lending Model

Kamino is a Solana lending protocol where users supply collateral to earn yield or borrow against deposited assets — the same lend-and-borrow money-market design familiar to Aave and Morpho users on other chains. The appointment places an operator from off-chain alternative investments at the top of that stack.

The Incoming CEO's Yieldstreet Background

CoinDesk identifies Weisz as a co-founder of Yieldstreet, an alternative-investment platform now operating as Willow Wealth. The connection is a founder relationship to that firm; it does not imply any corporate partnership between Willow Wealth and Kamino.

A naming distinction matters for Kamino watchers: Yieldstreet, Weisz's former company, is separate from Yield.xyz, the third-party distribution provider Kamino integrated earlier. The two share no relationship beyond the coincidence of the word "yield."

What the Appointment Means for Kamino

The leadership change lands as Kamino extends lending into tokenized real-world assets. CoinDesk reported that the protocol's PRIME market was built with Figure Technologies and Hastra, using Figure's blockchain-based home equity loans as collateral — a collateral type well outside the crypto-native assets that dominate Solana money markets. Tokenization — representing assets as on-chain tokens — is what allows loan collateral of this kind to sit alongside crypto-native positions in a money market.

Kamino has told CoinDesk that PRIME deposits surpassed $600 million within 107 days of launch, and that the protocol has processed more than $650 billion in cumulative transaction volume over four years. These are company-reported figures, not independently audited balances, and cumulative volume should not be equated with total value locked.

The distribution rails behind Weisz's stated focus on asset managers already exist. In its official Yield.xyz announcement, Kamino said that wallets, custodians, neobanks, exchanges and fintechs using Yield.xyz can route into Kamino markets through a single API, with transaction flows constructed by the API while execution and signing remain client-side, keeping the integration non-custodial.

That non-custodial routing matters for the institutional audience Weisz named: counterparties can access Kamino liquidity without surrendering key control, a prerequisite for regulated custodians. The integration predates the appointment, so it should not be read as a product of the new CEO's tenure.

Kamino's operational profile has drawn ecosystem attention before, including a major bug bounty program on Solana aimed at hardening its contracts as deposits scale. The New York build-out and planned legal hire are business plans; they do not establish regulatory authorization for tokenized-securities or lending products.

The push into tokenized collateral tracks a broader institutional move into on-chain wrappers. For Kamino users, the near-term watch items are governance decisions on PRIME risk parameters and how real-world-asset collateral is priced and liquidated against crypto-native positions — details not addressed in the reported appointment.