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Head-to-head · Lending & Borrowing

Kamino Lend vs Compound Same published score.

Compound and Kamino Lend tie on score at 74; the published tie-break orders them. Compound is ahead on rate authorship and shortfall record. Kamino Lend ranks #5 and Compound #6 of 8 published lending & borrowing. The ledger below shows where each side is ahead — pick by the criterion that matters to you.

Kamino Lend74
Compound74
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99 · ranks #5 and #6 of 8
Methodology v2026.10.18Ranking snapshot Evidence verified through 4 published criteria5 score dimensions Receipt #cc-VS-KAMINO-LEND-VS-COMPOUND-3aa7a7d1
Published verdictRanking snapshot 3 November 2026

Same published score — 74 each

Compound and Kamino Lend tie on score at 74; the published tie-break orders them. Compound is ahead on rate authorship and shortfall record.

Kamino Lend #5 of 874
Compound #6 of 874
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99; a bar is empty at 41 and full at 99.
Why, term by termCompound leads on 2 of 4 published criteria; Kamino Lend on 1. The terms sum to the gap.
TermCompoundKamino LendWeightPoints
Blast radius7/109/105.8−3.0for Kamino Lend−1.5 of 32
Rate authorship9/108/105.8+1.5for Compound+0.8 of 32
Shortfall record8/107/104.8+1.2for Compound+0.6 of 32
Net of the terms−0.2
Reproduced gap−0.3
Published gapAfter score rounding and bounds — see the note below74740.0

Weight is in points of the 86-point weighted total. Points are score points of the gap between the two.

Quick facts

At a glance

3 of 4 rows read the same for both.
FactKamino LendCompound
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 Treat the table as out of date.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.Compound III charges no subscription, listing or curator fee; the protocol's take is the spread between separate supply and borrow curves that governance sets. The Interest Rates page (https://docs.compound.finance/interest-rates/, fetched 28 September 2026): "Users with a positive balance of the base asset earn interest, denominated in the base asset, based on a supply rate model; users with a negative balance pay interest based on a borrow rate model. These are separate interest rate models, and set by governance." Compound publishes the size of that spread only per proposal on its forum. For the Ethereum WETH Comet, Gauntlet's 5 August 2026 post (https://www.comp.xyz/t/ethereum-weth-comet-borrow-rate-irm-updates/7999, fetched 28 September 2026) states "Compound v3 has no reserve factor parameter" and prints the implied reserve factor as "0.00%" at the kink and "10.00%" at full utilisation, adding "The comet currently retains none of the interest borrowers pay at its optimal utilization." Comets being wound down are repriced by the same route: a 2 September 2026 forum proposal sets the Ethereum wstETH Comet's supply rate to zero ahead of deprecation. Live per-market APYs are on-chain only, so no APY is quoted.
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
Pick it when
Pick Kamino Lend if blast radius matters most — it scores 9/10 to Compound's 7/10 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.

Compound

74#6 of 8
Pick it when
Pick Compound if rate authorship matters most — it scores 9/10 to Kamino Lend's 8/10 there (weight 24).
Strength
Rate authorship — 9/10
Tradeoff
Compound now has one of the cleanest RATE disclosures in this pool and one of the thinnest ORACLE disclosures, and a buyer who conflates the two will misprice it. Four specific traps. First, the page that tells you what liquidates you — https://docs.compound.finance/liquidation/ — never names an oracle at all ("This function uses the price returned by the protocol’s price feed"); Chainlink is named two clicks away on the helper-functions page, and a machine check of all nine Compound doc pages returns zero occurrences of deviation, heartbeat, staleness, median, fallback, killswitch or price bound. The one bounded feed Compound ever ran — the multisig-settable min/max and constant-price override added to rsETH after the 18 April 2026 Kelp bridge exploit — was REVERTED in May 2026 via Proposal 586, so as of today no Compound market carries a numeric price bound. Second, the docs registry is a snapshot, not live state: stamped 2026-02-28, it still advertises rsETH on the Ethereum USDC Comet at 85% borrow CF and a 1,500-token supply cap when the on-chain cap has since been set to 0, and it still lists ten mainnet networks when six of them — Polygon, Unichain, Linea, Mantle, Ronin and Scroll — are approved for deprecation with supply caps zeroed, collateral factors halved and supply rates being set to 0%. Read the Comet and the forum, not the docs table. Third, the one-week governance timelock that makes Compound's rate authorship trustworthy does NOT cover the emergency path: the Community Multi-Sig pause guardian can freeze withdrawals instantly (it did so across six networks in April 2026), and a 0% collateral factor mechanically locks collateral until debt is fully repaid — both disclosed on the forum, neither in the docs. Fourth, the named backstop is real but shrinking and undocumented at the tail: reserves on the Ethereum WETH Comet fell from 921.22 to 908.46 WETH between 10 May and 5 August 2026 because the comet "retains none of the interest borrowers pay at its optimal utilization", no Compound page says what happens once reserves are exhausted, and Compound discloses its losses well on comp.xyz and not at all on either page titled Security.
Self-identify in 10 seconds

Which one is actually for you?

Kamino Lend

Choose Kamino Lend if blast radius matters most

  • Blast radius: 9/10 against 7/10 for Compound (weight 24)
Compound

Choose Compound if rate authorship matters most

  • Rate authorship: 9/10 against 8/10 for Kamino Lend (weight 24)
  • Shortfall record: 8/10 against 7/10 for Kamino Lend (weight 20)
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 out of 10
Compound6 out of 10

Rate authorship

by 1 of 10weight 5.8 of 86Compound leads
Kamino Lend8 out of 10
Compound9 out of 10

Blast radius

by 2 of 10weight 5.8 of 86Kamino Lend leads
Kamino Lend9 out of 10
Compound7 out of 10

Shortfall record

by 1 of 10weight 4.8 of 86Compound leads
Kamino Lend7 out of 10
Compound8 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 Lend14/20Compound14/20
Tie
Published criteriaweight 30 of 86
Kamino Lend17.8/30Compound17.7/30
Kamino Lend leads
Frictionweight 10 of 86 · constant here
Kamino Lend2.7/10Compound2.7/10
Tie
Trust recordweight 8 of 86 · constant here
Kamino Lend3.2/8Compound3.2/8
Tie
Measured dataweight 18 of 86 · constant here
Kamino Lend8.3/18Compound8.3/18
Tie
Decision rulePublished order

Same published score — pick by the criterion that matters to you.

Pick Kamino Lend if blast radius matters most — it scores 9/10 to Compound's 7/10 there (weight 24).

Pick Compound 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, Compound 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, Compound 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, Compound 7/10)
    Scored by Has it lost lender money before, and did it publish it? · 20% (Kamino Lend 7/10, Compound 8/10)
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

Compound and Kamino Lend tie on score at 74; the published tie-break orders them. Compound is ahead on rate authorship and shortfall record. Published scores, out of 100: Kamino Lend 74 (rank 5 of 8 lending & borrowing), Compound 74 (rank 6 of 8).

Related pages

Go deeper

Reviewed Next review by Methodology v2026.10.18
How this page is reviewed

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.

Accountable for this review: Mathias Siemonsmeier, Founder.

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