Venus scores 7 points above Kamino Lend, led by oracle liquidation price, rate authorship, and shortfall record. Venus ranks #1 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.
VEVenus81
vs
Kamino Lend74
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99 · ranks #1 and #5 of 8
Venus scores 7 points above Kamino Lend, led by oracle liquidation price, rate authorship, and shortfall record.
VEVenus #1 of 881
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 termVenus leads on 3 of 4 published criteria; Kamino Lend on 1. The terms sum to the gap.
TermVenusKamino LendWeightPoints
Oracle liquidation price9/106/107.7+6.0for Venus+3.1 of 32
Blast radius7/109/105.8−3.0for Kamino Lend−1.5 of 32
Rate authorship9/108/105.8+1.5for Venus+0.8 of 32
Shortfall record9/107/104.8+2.5for Venus+1.3 of 32
Net of the terms+7.0
Criteria roundingThe criteria block is rounded to whole points before it is spread−0.2
Reproduced gap+6.8
Published gapAfter score rounding and bounds — see the note below8174+7.0
Weight is in points of the 86-point weighted total. Points are score points of the gap between the two.
VenusScore 81A shared-pool onchain money market whose BNB Chain book is 99.5% of the protocol and where, for that book, Venus publishes per-market oracle tiers with numeric cross-source bounds and links each tier to its deployed oracle contract - while its own forum carries dated, quantified post-mortems of the four times it lost lender money, including admissions its docs never repeat.Strength: Oracle liquidation price — 9/10Watch-out: Read https://docs-v4.venus.io/guides/isolated-pools-deprecation before you deposit - 'Venus isolated pools have been fully deprecated' - and then re-read the risk documentation knowing that. Almost everything Venus publishes about containing a loss automatically (the Shortfall auction, now paused - 'auctionsPaused() returned true' at a 27 Aug 2026 snapshot - and the healAccount write-off that 'records borrowBalance - actualRepayAmount as market badDebt') is scoped to those retired pools, and the risk-fund page, rewritten about a month before the 2026-09-28 read, says 'There is no universal on-chain function that automatically applies RiskFundV2 to every Venus bad-debt balance. Core Pool and isolated-pool accounting differ'. The FAQ still advertises isolated pools as preventing 'failures in one market from impacting others'. In practice a Core deficit is repaired only when governance votes to repair it from the Risk Fund - which it has done, twice, in full (VIP-564 2025-11-07, VIP-604 2026-03-30) - but that is a discretionary act, not a waterfall; the fund is on the order of 1% of Core debt, its balance is published nowhere, and the same page now calls it 'protocol-controlled funds allocated by governance; they are not a per-user insurance policy'. Second thing to read, and it is the one a leveraged holder underweights: the deprecation guide states that a missing price on any market in your position can block the exit - redeeming or calling exitMarket 'causes the Comptroller to check the account across all currently listed entered markets in that pool', and if the oracle 'still cannot produce a valid price for any required market, the operation can revert. exitMarket performs the same full-balance redeem check and generally cannot bypass that condition.' Third: the THE post-mortem concedes the published band did not stop the March 2026 attack - 'the BoundValidator reverted for approximately 37 minutes' and then accepted the manipulated price (THE carries the 1.05/0.95 band on the oracle table). The bounds are real, numeric and better disclosed than most of this pool, but they are a cross-source sanity check, not a manipulation-proof price.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.
FactVenusKamino Lend
PricingSnapshotVenus takes no deposit, withdrawal or curator fee on a direct Core supply; the protocol's take is each market's reserve factor. The Interest Rate Model page (https://docs-v4.venus.io/risk/interest-rate-model, fetched 28 September 2026) defines it inside the supply-rate formula - "For those models, if r_b is the borrow rate per slot and f is the reserve factor" - and states that it publishes no per-market value: "This is a model-selection overview, not a per-market configuration registry." The live values are API fields, not page text: https://api.venus.io/markets?chainId=56 on 28 September 2026 returned reserveFactorMantissa of 0.1 for USDT and USDC, 0.2 for ETH and 0.3 for BTCB and BNB, the largest BNB Core markets by borrows. The sentence this note carried until now (the old glossary definition of the reserve factor) is no longer on that page, which was rewritten about a month before this read.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?
VE
Venus
81#1 of 8
Leads
Pick it when
Pick Venus if oracle liquidation price matters most — it scores 9/10 to Kamino Lend's 6/10 there (weight 32).
Strength
Oracle liquidation price — 9/10
Tradeoff
Read https://docs-v4.venus.io/guides/isolated-pools-deprecation before you deposit - 'Venus isolated pools have been fully deprecated' - and then re-read the risk documentation knowing that. Almost everything Venus publishes about containing a loss automatically (the Shortfall auction, now paused - 'auctionsPaused() returned true' at a 27 Aug 2026 snapshot - and the healAccount write-off that 'records borrowBalance - actualRepayAmount as market badDebt') is scoped to those retired pools, and the risk-fund page, rewritten about a month before the 2026-09-28 read, says 'There is no universal on-chain function that automatically applies RiskFundV2 to every Venus bad-debt balance. Core Pool and isolated-pool accounting differ'. The FAQ still advertises isolated pools as preventing 'failures in one market from impacting others'. In practice a Core deficit is repaired only when governance votes to repair it from the Risk Fund - which it has done, twice, in full (VIP-564 2025-11-07, VIP-604 2026-03-30) - but that is a discretionary act, not a waterfall; the fund is on the order of 1% of Core debt, its balance is published nowhere, and the same page now calls it 'protocol-controlled funds allocated by governance; they are not a per-user insurance policy'. Second thing to read, and it is the one a leveraged holder underweights: the deprecation guide states that a missing price on any market in your position can block the exit - redeeming or calling exitMarket 'causes the Comptroller to check the account across all currently listed entered markets in that pool', and if the oracle 'still cannot produce a valid price for any required market, the operation can revert. exitMarket performs the same full-balance redeem check and generally cannot bypass that condition.' Third: the THE post-mortem concedes the published band did not stop the March 2026 attack - 'the BoundValidator reverted for approximately 37 minutes' and then accepted the manipulated price (THE carries the 1.05/0.95 band on the oracle table). The bounds are real, numeric and better disclosed than most of this pool, but they are a cross-source sanity check, not a manipulation-proof price.
Kamino Lend
74#5 of 8
Pick it when
Pick Kamino Lend if blast radius matters most — it scores 9/10 to Venus'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.
Self-identify in 10 seconds
Which one is actually for you?
VEVenusLeads
Choose Venus if oracle liquidation price matters most
Oracle liquidation price: 9/10 against 6/10 for Kamino Lend (weight 32)
Rate authorship: 9/10 against 8/10 for Kamino Lend (weight 24)
Shortfall record: 9/10 against 7/10 for Kamino Lend (weight 20)
VenusScore 81A shared-pool onchain money market whose BNB Chain book is 99.5% of the protocol and where, for that book, Venus publishes per-market oracle tiers with numeric cross-source bounds and links each tier to its deployed oracle contract - while its own forum carries dated, quantified post-mortems of the four times it lost lender money, including admissions its docs never repeat.Strength: Oracle liquidation price — 9/10Watch-out: Read https://docs-v4.venus.io/guides/isolated-pools-deprecation before you deposit - 'Venus isolated pools have been fully deprecated' - and then re-read the risk documentation knowing that. Almost everything Venus publishes about containing a loss automatically (the Shortfall auction, now paused - 'auctionsPaused() returned true' at a 27 Aug 2026 snapshot - and the healAccount write-off that 'records borrowBalance - actualRepayAmount as market badDebt') is scoped to those retired pools, and the risk-fund page, rewritten about a month before the 2026-09-28 read, says 'There is no universal on-chain function that automatically applies RiskFundV2 to every Venus bad-debt balance. Core Pool and isolated-pool accounting differ'. The FAQ still advertises isolated pools as preventing 'failures in one market from impacting others'. In practice a Core deficit is repaired only when governance votes to repair it from the Risk Fund - which it has done, twice, in full (VIP-564 2025-11-07, VIP-604 2026-03-30) - but that is a discretionary act, not a waterfall; the fund is on the order of 1% of Core debt, its balance is published nowhere, and the same page now calls it 'protocol-controlled funds allocated by governance; they are not a per-user insurance policy'. Second thing to read, and it is the one a leveraged holder underweights: the deprecation guide states that a missing price on any market in your position can block the exit - redeeming or calling exitMarket 'causes the Comptroller to check the account across all currently listed entered markets in that pool', and if the oracle 'still cannot produce a valid price for any required market, the operation can revert. exitMarket performs the same full-balance redeem check and generally cannot bypass that condition.' Third: the THE post-mortem concedes the published band did not stop the March 2026 attack - 'the BoundValidator reverted for approximately 37 minutes' and then accepted the manipulated price (THE carries the 1.05/0.95 band on the oracle table). The bounds are real, numeric and better disclosed than most of this pool, but they are a cross-source sanity check, not a manipulation-proof price.
Kamino Lend
Choose Kamino Lend if blast radius matters most
Blast radius: 9/10 against 7/10 for Venus (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 3 of 10weight 7.7 of 86Venus leads
Venus9/10 out of 10
Kamino Lend6/10 out of 10
Rate authorship
by 1 of 10weight 5.8 of 86Venus leads
Venus9/10 out of 10
Kamino Lend8/10 out of 10
Blast radius
by 2 of 10weight 5.8 of 86Kamino Lend leads
Venus7/10 out of 10
Kamino Lend9/10 out of 10
Shortfall record
by 2 of 10weight 4.8 of 86Venus leads
Venus9/10 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
Venus14/20Kamino Lend14/20
Tie
Published criteriaweight 30 of 86
Venus20.4/30Kamino Lend17.8/30
Venus leads
Frictionweight 10 of 86 · constant here
Venus2.7/10Kamino Lend2.7/10
Tie
Trust recordweight 8 of 86 · constant here
Venus3.2/8Kamino Lend3.2/8
Tie
Measured dataweight 18 of 86 · constant here
Venus8.3/18Kamino Lend8.3/18
Tie
Decision rulePublished order
Choose Venus 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 Venus's 7/10 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% (Venus 9/10, 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% (Venus 9/10, 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% (Venus 7/10, Kamino Lend 9/10)
Scored by Has it lost lender money before, and did it publish it? · 20% (Venus 9/10, 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
Venus scores 7 points above Kamino Lend, led by oracle liquidation price, rate authorship, and shortfall record. Published scores, out of 100: Venus 81 (rank 1 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.
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
