Spark scores 6 points above Kamino Lend, led by oracle liquidation price and rate authorship. Spark ranks #2 and Kamino Lend #5 of 8 published lending & borrowing. Every term of the gap is on the ledger below; the inputs are on the audit receipt.
Spark80
vs
Kamino Lend74
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99 · ranks #2 and #5 of 8
Spark scores 6 points above Kamino Lend, led by oracle liquidation price and rate authorship.
Spark #2 of 880
Kamino Lend #5 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 termSpark leads on 2 of 4 published criteria; Kamino Lend on 1. The terms sum to the gap.
TermSparkKamino LendWeightPoints
Oracle liquidation price8/106/107.7+4.0for Spark+2.0 of 32
Rate authorship10/108/105.8+3.0for Spark+1.5 of 32
Blast radius8/109/105.8−1.5for Kamino Lend−0.8 of 32
Net of the terms+5.5
Reproduced gap+5.5
Published gapAfter score rounding and bounds — see the note below8074+6.0
Weight is in points of the 86-point weighted total. Points are score points of the gap between the two.
SparkScore 80SparkLend is an Ethereum-only Aave v3 fork run as Sky's in-house money market: prices come from a three-oracle median of RedStone, Chainlink and Chronicle with a Uniswap TWAP as last resort, your deposit is never re-routed by a curator, and the borrow rate is an immutable per-reserve IRM — SSR-anchored on the stablecoin reserves — that Sky governance can only change by redeploying the contract.Strength: Rate authorship — 10/10Watch-out: Read the oracle-type field on your collateral in the app before you post it, and read the liquidity line before you supply. SparkLend does not price every asset at market: 'stablecoins such as USDS and DAI use a fixed price of 1.00 USD, which does not deviate even if the asset's market price moves away from this value' (https://docs.spark.fi/products/sparklend/guides/oracles). If you post USDS or DAI as collateral, a real-world depeg will not move your health factor at all — and the peg-ratio killswitch that exists for exactly this failure covers only 'wstETH, rETH, weETH, cbBTC, WBTC, LBTC', not the fixed-price stablecoins (https://docs.spark.fi/products/sparklend). USDS is issued by Sky, whose governance both sets that $1.00 constant and authors your borrow rate, so the protection and the exposure share a controller. Second, the USDC supply rate you are being shown was deliberately engineered by thinning the withdrawal buffer, and Spark's own risk body said so before the vote: 'At 98% utilization, only about 2% of supplied USDC is immediately available before new deposits, repayments, liquidations, or other liquidity sources are needed. Withdrawals become more fragile', and 'The proposal improves the displayed supply rate by accepting a thinner liquidity buffer' (Spark Risk Council, 2026-06-22, https://forum.skyeco.com/t/july-2-2026-proposed-changes-to-spark-for-upcoming-spell/27982).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.
Quick facts
At a glance
3 of 4 rows read the same for both.
FactSparkKamino Lend
PricingSnapshotSparkLend's stablecoin reserves price off the Sky Savings Rate (SSR) plus a fixed spread up to the kink, and suppliers receive the borrow interest less a 10% reserve factor; there is no deposit or curator fee. The 10 September 2026 spell proposal (https://forum.skyeco.com/t/september-10-2026-proposed-changes-to-spark-for-upcoming-spell/28208, posted 31 August 2026, fetched 28 September 2026) reads the rate on-chain at Ethereum block 25,861,675 (29 August 2026): "getVariableRateSlope1() returns 3.9594644783474038423088%, which equals the SSR of 3.4594644783474038423088% plus the 0.50% spread exactly." For USDT, the largest reserve, it cuts that spread "from 0.005e27 (+0.50%) to 0.001e27 (+0.10%)" and states the effect: "The borrow rate at the kink falls from 3.9595% to 3.5595%" and "At 95% utilisation and a 10% reserve factor that is a supply rate of about 3.04%"; at the time of posting "The live borrow rate is 3.4824% and the live supply rate 2.6186%." The same post gives the other stablecoin curves: "USDC runs a 98% kink with a +1.00% spread". These are SSR-linked and move with every SSR change and with utilisation; they are not a fixed price. The 2 July 2026 SSR figure this note previously carried is superseded.Kamino 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.
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?
Spark
80#2 of 8
Leads
Pick it when
Pick Spark if oracle liquidation price matters most — it scores 8/10 to Kamino Lend's 6/10 there (weight 32).
Strength
Rate authorship — 10/10
Tradeoff
Read the oracle-type field on your collateral in the app before you post it, and read the liquidity line before you supply. SparkLend does not price every asset at market: 'stablecoins such as USDS and DAI use a fixed price of 1.00 USD, which does not deviate even if the asset's market price moves away from this value' (https://docs.spark.fi/products/sparklend/guides/oracles). If you post USDS or DAI as collateral, a real-world depeg will not move your health factor at all — and the peg-ratio killswitch that exists for exactly this failure covers only 'wstETH, rETH, weETH, cbBTC, WBTC, LBTC', not the fixed-price stablecoins (https://docs.spark.fi/products/sparklend). USDS is issued by Sky, whose governance both sets that $1.00 constant and authors your borrow rate, so the protection and the exposure share a controller. Second, the USDC supply rate you are being shown was deliberately engineered by thinning the withdrawal buffer, and Spark's own risk body said so before the vote: 'At 98% utilization, only about 2% of supplied USDC is immediately available before new deposits, repayments, liquidations, or other liquidity sources are needed. Withdrawals become more fragile', and 'The proposal improves the displayed supply rate by accepting a thinner liquidity buffer' (Spark Risk Council, 2026-06-22, https://forum.skyeco.com/t/july-2-2026-proposed-changes-to-spark-for-upcoming-spell/27982).
Kamino Lend
74#5 of 8
Pick it when
Pick Kamino Lend if blast radius matters most — it scores 9/10 to Spark's 8/10 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.
Self-identify in 10 seconds
Which one is actually for you?
SparkLeads
Choose Spark if oracle liquidation price matters most
Oracle liquidation price: 8/10 against 6/10 for Kamino Lend (weight 32)
Rate authorship: 10/10 against 8/10 for Kamino Lend (weight 24)
SparkScore 80SparkLend is an Ethereum-only Aave v3 fork run as Sky's in-house money market: prices come from a three-oracle median of RedStone, Chainlink and Chronicle with a Uniswap TWAP as last resort, your deposit is never re-routed by a curator, and the borrow rate is an immutable per-reserve IRM — SSR-anchored on the stablecoin reserves — that Sky governance can only change by redeploying the contract.Strength: Rate authorship — 10/10Watch-out: Read the oracle-type field on your collateral in the app before you post it, and read the liquidity line before you supply. SparkLend does not price every asset at market: 'stablecoins such as USDS and DAI use a fixed price of 1.00 USD, which does not deviate even if the asset's market price moves away from this value' (https://docs.spark.fi/products/sparklend/guides/oracles). If you post USDS or DAI as collateral, a real-world depeg will not move your health factor at all — and the peg-ratio killswitch that exists for exactly this failure covers only 'wstETH, rETH, weETH, cbBTC, WBTC, LBTC', not the fixed-price stablecoins (https://docs.spark.fi/products/sparklend). USDS is issued by Sky, whose governance both sets that $1.00 constant and authors your borrow rate, so the protection and the exposure share a controller. Second, the USDC supply rate you are being shown was deliberately engineered by thinning the withdrawal buffer, and Spark's own risk body said so before the vote: 'At 98% utilization, only about 2% of supplied USDC is immediately available before new deposits, repayments, liquidations, or other liquidity sources are needed. Withdrawals become more fragile', and 'The proposal improves the displayed supply rate by accepting a thinner liquidity buffer' (Spark Risk Council, 2026-06-22, https://forum.skyeco.com/t/july-2-2026-proposed-changes-to-spark-for-upcoming-spell/27982).
Kamino Lend
Choose Kamino Lend if blast radius matters most
Blast radius: 9/10 against 8/10 for Spark (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.
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
by 2 of 10weight 7.7 of 86Spark leads
Spark8/10 out of 10
Kamino Lend6/10 out of 10
Rate authorship
by 2 of 10weight 5.8 of 86Spark leads
Spark10/10 out of 10
Kamino Lend8/10 out of 10
Blast radius
by 1 of 10weight 5.8 of 86Kamino Lend leads
Spark8/10 out of 10
Kamino Lend9/10 out of 10
Shortfall record
weight 4.8 of 86Tie
Spark7/10 out of 10
Kamino Lend7/10 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
Spark14/20Kamino Lend14/20
Tie
Published criteriaweight 30 of 86
Spark19.9/30Kamino Lend17.8/30
Spark leads
Frictionweight 10 of 86 · constant here
Spark2.7/10Kamino Lend2.7/10
Tie
Trust recordweight 8 of 86 · constant here
Spark3.2/8Kamino Lend3.2/8
Tie
Measured dataweight 18 of 86 · constant here
Spark8.3/18Kamino Lend8.3/18
Tie
Decision rulePublished order
Choose Spark unless the term Kamino Lend leads on is the one you are buying.
Pick Kamino Lend if blast radius matters most — it scores 9/10 to Spark'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% (Spark 10/10, Kamino Lend 8/10)
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% (Spark 8/10, Kamino Lend 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% (Spark 8/10, Kamino Lend 9/10)
Scored by Has it lost lender money before, and did it publish it? · 20% (Spark 7/10, Kamino Lend 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
Spark scores 6 points above Kamino Lend, led by oracle liquidation price and rate authorship. Published scores, out of 100: Spark 80 (rank 2 of 8 lending & borrowing), Kamino Lend 74 (rank 5 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.
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Spark #2 of 880
Kamino Lend #5 of 874