Kamino Lend vs Aave Kamino Lend leads by 3 points.
Kamino Lend scores 3 points above Aave, led by blast radius. Kamino Lend ranks #5 and Aave #8 of 8 published lending & borrowing. Every term of the gap is on the ledger below; the inputs are on the audit receipt.
Kamino Lend74
vs
AAAave71
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99 · ranks #5 and #8 of 8
Kamino Lend scores 3 points above Aave, led by blast radius.
Kamino Lend #5 of 874
AAAave #8 of 871
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99; a bar is empty at 41 and full at 99.
Why, term by termKamino Lend leads on 1 of 4 published criteria; Aave on 1. The terms sum to the gap.
TermKamino LendAaveWeightPoints
Blast radius9/106/105.8+4.5for Kamino Lend+2.3 of 32
Rate authorship8/109/105.8−1.5for Aave−0.8 of 32
Net of the terms+3.0
Criteria roundingThe criteria block is rounded to whole points before it is spread+0.1
Reproduced gap+3.1
Published gapAfter score rounding and bounds — see the note below7471+3.0
Weight is in points of the 86-point weighted total. Points are score points of the gap between the two.
Kamino LendScore 74Solana's largest onchain money market on its own reporting -- $2.22B supplied and $0.91B borrowed at 31 July 2026 -- and a venue that publishes far more as machine-readable data than as documentation: per-reserve rate knots, LTV, liquidation threshold, borrow factor, protocol take rate and a per-asset oracle staleness bound are all readable live from Kamino's own API, while the two numbers that decide whether a manipulated price closes your position -- which upstream feed prices your reserve, and the spot-vs-TWAP divergence guard -- are published for no market anywhere.Strength: Blast radius — 9/10Watch-out: Do not read the docs as the product, and do not read 'independent' as independent. Kamino's documentation is a well-written four-market story sitting on top of a 37-market, 171-vault surface, and on both occasions a docs number could be checked against Kamino's own protocol, the docs lost. The fee page prints 'SOL | SOL/BTC Market | 11%' and 'USDC | SOL/BTC Market | 15%' while Kamino's own API returned protocolTakeRate 0.15 and 0.10 on those reserves on 2026-08-17, and 0.15 and 0 on 2026-09-28 -- eight reserves across six SOL/BTC rows checked on 2026-08-17, every one wrong, in both directions, and this is the number that decides what share of your interest you never receive. Worse, https://kamino.com/docs/risk/safeguards/auto-deleverage still tells you the forced-unwind mechanism 'has not been activated to date' while Kamino's own governance forum dated and sized it twice: the December 2025 monthly report (published 2026-01-09) records 'the activation of ADL on December 18, 2025', '$138k' of debt cleared, 'zero bad debt and a median liquidation bonus of 0.47% of position size'. The mechanism that can march your LTV down on a 72-hour clock at a 50bp floor penalty is live, has been used, and on 2026-09-28 the safeguards page still said otherwise, more than nine months after that activation. Third: the monthly risk report that is Kamino's best disclosure asset closes 'This report represents independent risk analysis by Allez Labs for the Kamino Finance community' -- and Allez Labs curates Kamino's HYPE market and runs five Kamino vaults, two of which that same report reviews. Treat it as informed curator commentary, not as an external audit. Practical consequence: price this venue off the API and the gov forum, not the docs -- https://api.kamino.finance/kamino-market/{market}/reserves/{reserve}/metrics/history gives the actual borrowCurve, LTV, liquidation threshold and take rate per reserve. But note the curve is a shape, not a quote: the live borrow APY cannot be reproduced from the published curve using the docs' own interpolation formula, and the gap on SOL was a stable 22-24% across five sampled dates. And accept the one thing no Kamino surface will give you: which upstream feed prices your reserve, and the spot-vs-TWAP divergence threshold that decides whether a manipulated price closes your position, are per-reserve config fields published for no market -- knowable only by pulling the on-chain config yourself.AaveScore 71The reference shared-pool money market: it publishes the loss waterfall, the risk-steward mandate and its own incident arithmetic in more detail than anyone in the category, and publishes no deviation threshold or heartbeat anywhere for the price that actually liquidates you.Strength: Rate authorship — 9/10Watch-out: Read the April 2026 rsETH incident report before you supply anything to a WETH reserve — https://governance.aave.com/t/rseth-incident-report-april-20-2026/24580 — but read it together with its 2026-05-09 sequel, because the outcome was better than the report's models. An exploit entirely outside Aave (a 1-of-1 DVN bridge on someone else's LRT) put 89,567 rsETH ($221.39M) of collateral into Aave markets against $190.86M of WETH borrows. LlamaRisk modelled $123.7M-$230.1M of bad debt landing on ordinary WETH suppliers by reserve write-down — but those were explicitly labelled hypothetical scenarios, and per https://governance.aave.com/t/direct-to-aip-weth-unfreeze-and-ltv-restoration-across-aave-v3-instances/24878 the attacker's Aave positions were liquidated on 2026-05-06, all 89,567 rsETH was recovered, and the residual was covered by the DeFi United coalition. What you should still price is the machinery the event exposed, which has not changed: the Umbrella backstop covers Ethereum Core only and was PAUSED rather than drawn, so an Arbitrum, Base or Mantle supplier has no backstop at all; every affected WETH reserve sat at 100% utilisation with "idle balances below $20 on every chain", meaning a supplier with a perfectly healthy position could not withdraw; and the collateral that caused it was priced by an oracle whose deviation threshold and heartbeat appear nowhere in Aave's 91-page documentation corpus. None of this appears on https://aave.com/security, which still says "zero bad debt".
Quick facts
At a glance
3 of 4 rows read the same for both.
FactKamino LendAave
PricingSnapshotKamino charges borrowers no account fees; the cost is interest plus any liquidation penalty, and lenders give up a protocol spread. The Borrow fees page (https://kamino.com/docs/products/borrow/fees, fetched 28 September 2026): "There are no deposit fees, withdrawal fees, or origination fees on Kamino Borrow." and "The only costs to borrowers are interest on outstanding debt and, if applicable, liquidation penalties on unhealthy positions." The same page prints a protocol-spread table ("SOL SOL/BTC Market 11%", "USDC SOL/BTC Market 15%", "USDT SOL/BTC Market 15%") that the live protocol does not match: Kamino's own API on 28 September 2026 returned protocolTakeRate 0.15 for SOL, 0 for USDC and 0.1 for USDT in the SOL/BTC Market. Treat the table as out of date. Rates float on each reserve's curve, so no fixed APY is quoted.Aave charges no deposit or curator fee; suppliers earn borrower interest net of each reserve's reserve factor, and both rates float on a two-slope utilisation curve. The Interest Rate Strategy page (https://aave.com/docs/aave-v3/smart-contracts/interest-rate-strategy, fetched 28 September 2026): "Implements the calculation of the interest rates depending on the reserve state. The model of interest rate is based on two slopes" around the OPTIMAL_USAGE_RATIO kink. Aave's docs carry no live values (https://aave.com/docs/resources/parameters still shows only an SDK pointer); the numbers are published per change on the governance forum. LlamaRisk's Risk Steward post of 28 September 2026 (https://governance.aave.com/t/risk-stewards-cap-and-irm-changes-on-aave-v3-2026-09-28/25718) gives USDT on Aave V3 Core: "At the current 92.8% utilization, the post-change variable borrow rate would be 4.34% APR, down from 4.39% under the current IRM, and the supply rate would be 3.63% APR, down from 3.67%." It also states the protocol's take on one asset: "the 25% reserve factor that applies to USDe on all five reserves". Rates reprice every block with utilisation; these are point-in-time figures, not a quote.
Asset coverageEditorial——
Region fitSnapshotglobalglobal
Custody modelEditorialNon-custodial: no company holds the coinsNon-custodial: no company holds the coins
From the published criteria
Which should you pick?
Kamino Lend
74#5 of 8
Leads
Pick it when
Pick Kamino Lend if blast radius matters most — it scores 9/10 to Aave's 6/10 there (weight 24).
Strength
Blast radius — 9/10
Tradeoff
Do not read the docs as the product, and do not read 'independent' as independent. Kamino's documentation is a well-written four-market story sitting on top of a 37-market, 171-vault surface, and on both occasions a docs number could be checked against Kamino's own protocol, the docs lost. The fee page prints 'SOL | SOL/BTC Market | 11%' and 'USDC | SOL/BTC Market | 15%' while Kamino's own API returned protocolTakeRate 0.15 and 0.10 on those reserves on 2026-08-17, and 0.15 and 0 on 2026-09-28 -- eight reserves across six SOL/BTC rows checked on 2026-08-17, every one wrong, in both directions, and this is the number that decides what share of your interest you never receive. Worse, https://kamino.com/docs/risk/safeguards/auto-deleverage still tells you the forced-unwind mechanism 'has not been activated to date' while Kamino's own governance forum dated and sized it twice: the December 2025 monthly report (published 2026-01-09) records 'the activation of ADL on December 18, 2025', '$138k' of debt cleared, 'zero bad debt and a median liquidation bonus of 0.47% of position size'. The mechanism that can march your LTV down on a 72-hour clock at a 50bp floor penalty is live, has been used, and on 2026-09-28 the safeguards page still said otherwise, more than nine months after that activation. Third: the monthly risk report that is Kamino's best disclosure asset closes 'This report represents independent risk analysis by Allez Labs for the Kamino Finance community' -- and Allez Labs curates Kamino's HYPE market and runs five Kamino vaults, two of which that same report reviews. Treat it as informed curator commentary, not as an external audit. Practical consequence: price this venue off the API and the gov forum, not the docs -- https://api.kamino.finance/kamino-market/{market}/reserves/{reserve}/metrics/history gives the actual borrowCurve, LTV, liquidation threshold and take rate per reserve. But note the curve is a shape, not a quote: the live borrow APY cannot be reproduced from the published curve using the docs' own interpolation formula, and the gap on SOL was a stable 22-24% across five sampled dates. And accept the one thing no Kamino surface will give you: which upstream feed prices your reserve, and the spot-vs-TWAP divergence threshold that decides whether a manipulated price closes your position, are per-reserve config fields published for no market -- knowable only by pulling the on-chain config yourself.
AA
Aave
71#8 of 8
Pick it when
Pick Aave if rate authorship matters most — it scores 9/10 to Kamino Lend's 8/10 there (weight 24).
Strength
Rate authorship — 9/10
Tradeoff
Read the April 2026 rsETH incident report before you supply anything to a WETH reserve — https://governance.aave.com/t/rseth-incident-report-april-20-2026/24580 — but read it together with its 2026-05-09 sequel, because the outcome was better than the report's models. An exploit entirely outside Aave (a 1-of-1 DVN bridge on someone else's LRT) put 89,567 rsETH ($221.39M) of collateral into Aave markets against $190.86M of WETH borrows. LlamaRisk modelled $123.7M-$230.1M of bad debt landing on ordinary WETH suppliers by reserve write-down — but those were explicitly labelled hypothetical scenarios, and per https://governance.aave.com/t/direct-to-aip-weth-unfreeze-and-ltv-restoration-across-aave-v3-instances/24878 the attacker's Aave positions were liquidated on 2026-05-06, all 89,567 rsETH was recovered, and the residual was covered by the DeFi United coalition. What you should still price is the machinery the event exposed, which has not changed: the Umbrella backstop covers Ethereum Core only and was PAUSED rather than drawn, so an Arbitrum, Base or Mantle supplier has no backstop at all; every affected WETH reserve sat at 100% utilisation with "idle balances below $20 on every chain", meaning a supplier with a perfectly healthy position could not withdraw; and the collateral that caused it was priced by an oracle whose deviation threshold and heartbeat appear nowhere in Aave's 91-page documentation corpus. None of this appears on https://aave.com/security, which still says "zero bad debt".
Self-identify in 10 seconds
Which one is actually for you?
Kamino LendLeads
Choose Kamino Lend if blast radius matters most
Blast radius: 9/10 against 6/10 for Aave (weight 24)
Kamino LendScore 74Solana's largest onchain money market on its own reporting -- $2.22B supplied and $0.91B borrowed at 31 July 2026 -- and a venue that publishes far more as machine-readable data than as documentation: per-reserve rate knots, LTV, liquidation threshold, borrow factor, protocol take rate and a per-asset oracle staleness bound are all readable live from Kamino's own API, while the two numbers that decide whether a manipulated price closes your position -- which upstream feed prices your reserve, and the spot-vs-TWAP divergence guard -- are published for no market anywhere.Strength: Blast radius — 9/10Watch-out: Do not read the docs as the product, and do not read 'independent' as independent. Kamino's documentation is a well-written four-market story sitting on top of a 37-market, 171-vault surface, and on both occasions a docs number could be checked against Kamino's own protocol, the docs lost. The fee page prints 'SOL | SOL/BTC Market | 11%' and 'USDC | SOL/BTC Market | 15%' while Kamino's own API returned protocolTakeRate 0.15 and 0.10 on those reserves on 2026-08-17, and 0.15 and 0 on 2026-09-28 -- eight reserves across six SOL/BTC rows checked on 2026-08-17, every one wrong, in both directions, and this is the number that decides what share of your interest you never receive. Worse, https://kamino.com/docs/risk/safeguards/auto-deleverage still tells you the forced-unwind mechanism 'has not been activated to date' while Kamino's own governance forum dated and sized it twice: the December 2025 monthly report (published 2026-01-09) records 'the activation of ADL on December 18, 2025', '$138k' of debt cleared, 'zero bad debt and a median liquidation bonus of 0.47% of position size'. The mechanism that can march your LTV down on a 72-hour clock at a 50bp floor penalty is live, has been used, and on 2026-09-28 the safeguards page still said otherwise, more than nine months after that activation. Third: the monthly risk report that is Kamino's best disclosure asset closes 'This report represents independent risk analysis by Allez Labs for the Kamino Finance community' -- and Allez Labs curates Kamino's HYPE market and runs five Kamino vaults, two of which that same report reviews. Treat it as informed curator commentary, not as an external audit. Practical consequence: price this venue off the API and the gov forum, not the docs -- https://api.kamino.finance/kamino-market/{market}/reserves/{reserve}/metrics/history gives the actual borrowCurve, LTV, liquidation threshold and take rate per reserve. But note the curve is a shape, not a quote: the live borrow APY cannot be reproduced from the published curve using the docs' own interpolation formula, and the gap on SOL was a stable 22-24% across five sampled dates. And accept the one thing no Kamino surface will give you: which upstream feed prices your reserve, and the spot-vs-TWAP divergence threshold that decides whether a manipulated price closes your position, are per-reserve config fields published for no market -- knowable only by pulling the on-chain config yourself.
AAAave
Choose Aave if rate authorship matters most
Rate authorship: 9/10 against 8/10 for Kamino Lend (weight 24)
AaveScore 71The reference shared-pool money market: it publishes the loss waterfall, the risk-steward mandate and its own incident arithmetic in more detail than anyone in the category, and publishes no deviation threshold or heartbeat anywhere for the price that actually liquidates you.Strength: Rate authorship — 9/10Watch-out: Read the April 2026 rsETH incident report before you supply anything to a WETH reserve — https://governance.aave.com/t/rseth-incident-report-april-20-2026/24580 — but read it together with its 2026-05-09 sequel, because the outcome was better than the report's models. An exploit entirely outside Aave (a 1-of-1 DVN bridge on someone else's LRT) put 89,567 rsETH ($221.39M) of collateral into Aave markets against $190.86M of WETH borrows. LlamaRisk modelled $123.7M-$230.1M of bad debt landing on ordinary WETH suppliers by reserve write-down — but those were explicitly labelled hypothetical scenarios, and per https://governance.aave.com/t/direct-to-aip-weth-unfreeze-and-ltv-restoration-across-aave-v3-instances/24878 the attacker's Aave positions were liquidated on 2026-05-06, all 89,567 rsETH was recovered, and the residual was covered by the DeFi United coalition. What you should still price is the machinery the event exposed, which has not changed: the Umbrella backstop covers Ethereum Core only and was PAUSED rather than drawn, so an Arbitrum, Base or Mantle supplier has no backstop at all; every affected WETH reserve sat at 100% utilisation with "idle balances below $20 on every chain", meaning a supplier with a perfectly healthy position could not withdraw; and the collateral that caused it was priced by an oracle whose deviation threshold and heartbeat appear nowhere in Aave's 91-page documentation corpus. None of this appears on https://aave.com/security, which still says "zero bad debt".
Criterion by criterion
Scorecard
Published criteria · weight in points of 868 of 8 cells scored. Strength is read from the evidence file; the weight is the published one. Methodology
Oracle liquidation price
weight 7.7 of 86Tie
Kamino Lend6/10 out of 10
Aave6/10 out of 10
Rate authorship
by 1 of 10weight 5.8 of 86Aave leads
Kamino Lend8/10 out of 10
Aave9/10 out of 10
Blast radius
by 3 of 10weight 5.8 of 86Kamino Lend leads
Kamino Lend9/10 out of 10
Aave6/10 out of 10
Shortfall record
weight 4.8 of 86Tie
Kamino Lend7/10 out of 10
Aave7/10 out of 10
Score dimensions
weights sum to 86
The published score is five dimensions, each weighted for the category. "Published criteria" is the criteria block above; the other four are the engine's own terms — availability, friction, trust record, measured data. Each bar is one side's points out of that dimension's maximum; the weight beside the name is its points of the 86-point weighted total. The published criteria above can fill 24 of the block’s 30. A weight marked “constant here” belongs to a dimension every ranked product in the category holds at the same value: it still counts in the total, and it orders nothing here.
Availabilityweight 20 of 86 · constant here
Kamino Lend14/20Aave14/20
Tie
Published criteriaweight 30 of 86
Kamino Lend17.8/30Aave16.6/30
Kamino Lend leads
Frictionweight 10 of 86 · constant here
Kamino Lend2.7/10Aave2.7/10
Tie
Trust recordweight 8 of 86 · constant here
Kamino Lend3.2/8Aave3.2/8
Tie
Measured dataweight 18 of 86 · constant here
Kamino Lend8.3/18Aave8.3/18
Tie
Decision rulePublished order
Choose Kamino Lend unless the term Aave leads on is the one you are buying.
Pick Aave if rate authorship matters most — it scores 9/10 to Kamino Lend's 8/10 there (weight 24).
The published order weighs every criterion the same way for everyone. To weigh them your way, run .
From the published order
Next best action
If this isn't your case
Other matchups worth comparing
How you can lose money here, and what the ranking scores
Control failure: a key or vote changes the rules, freezes or mints.
Scored by Who sets your rate — a utilisation curve or a curator? · 24% (Kamino Lend 8/10, Aave 9/10)
Oracle failure: a wrong price or outcome liquidates or settles a position.
Scored by What price gets you liquidated, and how far can it drift? · 32% (Kamino Lend 6/10, Aave 6/10)
Insolvency failure: the firm or issuer that owes you cannot pay.
Scored by If one market goes bad, how much of yours goes with it? · 24% (Kamino Lend 9/10, Aave 6/10)
Scored by Has it lost lender money before, and did it publish it? · 20% (Kamino Lend 7/10, Aave 7/10)
Not assessed by this ranking: Contract failure, Regulatory failure, Execution failure, Exit failure. A high place says nothing about these; the Methodology tab says what each means.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Kamino Lend scores 3 points above Aave, led by blast radius. Published scores, out of 100: Kamino Lend 74 (rank 5 of 8 lending & borrowing), Aave 71 (rank 8 of 8).
Reviewed means both products compared here was read against its sources on or after that date; every ranked category is re-read at least every 45 days. Models research, extract and parse. A deterministic engine ranks. Every quote passes an adversarial refute pass.
Answer a few quick questions and get one clear recommendation based on how you actually plan to use crypto — with rationale, tradeoffs, and a path to monitor the decision.
No signup·Free first pass · Private·No spam · No account
Not financial advice · Independent · Always do your own research
Not financial advice · For informational purposes only · Always do your own research
Kamino Lend #5 of 874