Introducing: Kamino Season 5

DawidSnyders · November 7, 2025, 5:14pm

Today concludes Kamino Season 4, and marks the start of Kamino Season 5, a continuation of Kamino’s ongoing initiative to rewards users and extend the protocol’s position as Solana’s core credit and liquidity venue.

Season 5 will expand the reward surface across more products on Kamino — including additional Lending Vaults and, significantly, borrowing positions. As with Season 4, Season 5 will once again reward up to 100,000,000 KMNO across a 3-month duration.

In this article, we’ll cover:

Season 4 Recap
Season 5 Overview
KMNO Staking
Vesting Structure
Borrow Rewards Explainer

Let’s dive in.

1. Season 4 Stimulated 800% Lending Vault Growth

Season 4 introduced a new rewards mechanism, marking a departure from Kamino Points in favour of rewarding users directly in vested KMNO. The sole focus of Season 4 was Lending Vault growth, which experienced substantial growth throughout the Season.

Over the three-month duration of Season 4, Lending Vault deposits grew from $80M to $750M at its peak, an increase of more than 800%, with over 9,000 unique depositors participating by the end of the season, a 3x increase from the <3,000 before Season 4.

Whilst users earned around 90M KMNO via Season 4 Lending Vault rewards, they also earned over $6M in pure yield via direct interest & incentives generated via the vaults.

Thus, in total, users earned over $11M accounting for all yield, incentives, and Season 4 rewards.

Among active markets, USDC Prime, CASH, and PYUSD Lending Vaults drew the largest share of deposits, together surpassing $500M in supplied liquidity by the end of the season.

We believe that the growth of Kamino’s Lending Vaults throughout Season 4 clearly indicates that this rewards mechanism is effective in attracting net new flows into specific products.

Season 4 is now concluded, and the 6-month vesting period will kick off on Wednesday, November 12th, marking the start of a six-month unlock period. An in-depth Season 4 retrospective and vesting overview will be published prior to the vesting kick-off.

In the meantime, Season 4 info can be found in the Season 4 tab of the rewards UI.

2. Season 5 Introduction

Season 5 will follow the same rewards pool and duration as Season 4:

Duration: 3 Months
Rewards: Up to 100,000,000 KMNO

Lending Vault Rewards Continuation

Most of the existing Season 4 Lending Vault rewards will continue into Season 5 — with two significant additions to Lending Vaults rewards:

CASH Earn - 3x rewards increase: 1,680,000 KMNO p/w
Gauntlet Prime USDC: 300,000 KMNO p/w

These two vaults are core to the continued focus in growing stablecoin liquidity on Kamino Lend.

Stimulating Borrow Activity With Season 5

In addition to Lending Vaults, Season 5 will expand a significant portion of KMNO rewards to borrowing activity. To kick off, 4.5M weekly KMNO is being rewarded across two key borrow pairs:

USDC Borrows against SOL Collateral: 4,000,000 KMNO p/w
USDC Borrow against cbBTC Collateral: 500,000 KMNO p/w

The goal with borrow rewards is to stimulate productive borrow activity against blue-chip collateral assets, which can in turn attract additional flows of SOL and cbBTC into Solana DeFi — both of which ultimately have a net positive on the ecosystem.

How Borrow Rewards Work

At the start, Season 5 borrow rewards provide users with incentives to borrow a specific asset, using another, specific asset as collateral. For example, borrowing USDC against SOL.

In this case, rewards are earned based on how much USDC a user borrows against SOL. The more USDC you borrow, the more KMNO rewards you accrue to your Season 5 total. This rewards mechanism is broken down in far more detail at the bottom of this article.

3. KMNO Staking

As with previous seasons, Season 5 will continue to benefit users who stake their KMNO while using Kamino’s products. Note that all boosts accrued thus far will remain valid in Season 5, thus rewarding users with long-term KMNO positions.

The staking boost structure work exactly as Season 4:

Season 5 KMNO Staking Structure

KMNO Staking in Season 5 will act as a USD value multiplier, with your staking boost determining how much your position value is multiplied.

We’ll cover in-depth examples below, but here’s a summary of how it works:

How to Earn Staking Boost

New users start with a default 3% staking boost on their position
Accrued staking boost from Season 4 automatically carries over for Season 5
For each day you remain staked, you accrue an additional 0.1% staking boost

How Staking Boosts Work

Your boost % applies to the Rewards APY value in your position
For each 1 KMNO you have staked, your boost % applies to $1 of your funds
For example, if you have 100,000 KMNO staked, your boost % will apply to the Rewards APY for $100,000 of your positions earning Season 5 Rewards

Examples:

If you have $100,000 deposited with a staking boost of 50%, and 100,000 KMNO staked, your entire $100,000 earns a 50% higher rewards APY
However, if you have $100,000 deposited with a staking boost of 50%, but only 25,000 KMNO staked, only 25% of your position receives a boosted APY

Simple way of calculating this: KMNO Staked (Amount) / Active Positions (USD Value) = 25,000 / 100,000 = 25%.

Thus, effectively, your staking boost is only worth 25% of its actual value due to insufficient KMNO staking. So a 50% staking boost becomes a 12.5% staking boost.

4. Season 5 Vesting and Claim Structure

Season 5 will follow the same vesting model introduced in Season 4. All rewards are vested KMNO, accruing in real time and displayed directly in the interface.

At the end of the season, users can choose between:

Early claim: claim a portion of vested KMNO immediately, forfeiting the remaining amount to the community bonus pool.
Full vest: wait until the six-month vesting period concludes to receive the full amount plus a proportional share of the bonus pool.

The early claim penalty decreases progressively throughout the vesting period, allowing users to claim at any time based on preference. This system rewards long-term alignment.

5. Borrow Rewards Explained

Borrow rewards are designed to rewards users for the amount of borrows they have against a specific collateral assets. For example, at launch, Season 5 will reward:

USDC borrows against SOL
USDC borrows against cbBTC

Here’s how these rewards work. We’ll use cbBTC/USDC as the example, but the same applies to any pair-specific borrows.

Rewards Criteria

A position must contain cbBTC collateral and USDC debt
In a position with multiple collateral/debt assets, only the weighted amount of USDC borrowed against cbBTC is considered

Rewards Calculation

There are two APY values to consider:

Max APY
This is the value shown in the market list, and refers to the maximum possible APY a user can earn on their debt:
KMNO apy = total rewards per year / total USDC debt backed by cbBTC in market
User APY
This is the actual rewards a user is earning on their debt based on their collateral/debt composition:
user apy = KMNO apy * ( user USDC debt backed by cbBTc / total user USDC debt )
Where user USDC debt backed by cbBTC is calculated as:
user USDC debt backed by cbBTC = user cbBTC collateral / user total collateral * total user USDC debt

A user’s reward amount thus considers the weighted amount of USDC borrowed against cbBTC in their position, in relation to total USDC borrowed against cbBTC in the market.

We’ll cover a few examples below:

Rewards Examples

Let’s assume the current KMNO APY (i.e. max possible APY) = 10%

Example #1:
Position with only cbBTC collateral and USDC Debt

cbBTC Collateral = $100
USDC Debt = $50

user apy = KMNO apy * ( user USDC debt backed by cbBTC / total user USDC debt )
user apy = 10% * ( 50 / 50)
user apy = 10%

In this scenario, the user earns the Maximum APY value on their debt. With 50 USDC Debt debt, the user would earn 5 USDC annually. At a 10% Borrow APY, for example, their USDC rewards would offset 100% of their annual borrow cost.

Example #2:
Position with SOL and cbBTC collateral, and USDC Debt

SOL Collateral = $50
cbBTC Collateral = $100
USDC Debt = $50

In this scenario, we first calculate how much of the user’s USDC debt is backed by cbBTC:

user USDC debt backed by cbBTC = ( user cbBTC collateral / user total collateral ) * total user USDC debt
user USDC debt backed by cbBTC = (100 / 150) * 50
user USDC debt backed by cbBTC = 33.33

This means, out of the total 50 USDC debt, 33.33 USDC is backed by the cbBTC collateral. We can then calculate the user’s APY:

user apy = KMNO apy * ( user USDC debt backed by cbBTC / total user USDC debt )
user apy = 10% * ( 33.33 / 50 )
user apy = 6.6%

In this scenario, the user earns a 6.6% KMNO APY value on their debt. With 50 USDC debt, the user would earn 3.3 USDC annually. At a 10% Borrow APY, for example, their USDC rewards would offset 66% of their annual borrow cost.

Example #3:
Position with cbBTC collateral, and USDC and USDT Debt

cbBTC Collateral = $100
USDC Debt = $50
USDT Debt = $20

In this scenario, the user is borrowing at a 70% LTV, but is earning rewards on only the USDC portion of their debt. In practice this comes down to the same calculation as Example #1, where the user earns: