Kamino has just integrated xStocks on Kamino Lend, powered by the Chainlink data standard, enabling users to borrow against their tokenized equities, directly on chain. With this onboarding, Kamino becomes the first major borrow/lend protocol in DeFi to onboard tokenized equities as collateral, marking a significant milestone for Solana, and DeFi at large.
Unlocking Permissionless Credit Via Kamino
Obtaining credit typically involves multiple steps and intermediaries, most of which can be automated using blockchain technology.
Via its V2 infrastructure, Kamino has launched a new xStocks Market, designed specifically for users to deploy their xStocks as collateral, and borrow stablecoins against it. At launch, 8 xStocks are available as collateral on Kamino: SPYx, QQQx, GOOGLx, APPLx, NVDAx, TSLAx, MSTRx, and HOODx.
Ultimately, the vision is for Kamino to be the full-suite, onchain asset marketplace, where users can swap their assets, borrow against their assets, or leverage their exposure with margin.
Today is a monumental step, not only for Kamino, but for broader DeFi itself. Permissionless financial rails are maturing, and beginning to encompass TradFi use cases in a way that is more efficient, accessible, and transparent.
The DeFi-TradFi Convergence
xStocks officially launched on June 30th, enabling users to gain exposure to equities via onchain assets, backed 1:1 by the underlying security. xStocks tokenize over 60 equities—including AAPL, TSLA, SPY, and many more—making them more accessible, freely transferable, and available 24/7 onchain by leveraging Chainlink Data Streams.
In its first week, xStocks has been integrated across 5 CEXs: Bybit, Kraken, Bitget, and Gate, all of which enable these assets to be transferred to Solana, and deployable into Solana DeFi.
xStocks is a significant step in the convergence of DeFi and TradFi. With the integration of xStocks on Kamino, on-chain credit use cases are opening up for a trillion-dollar asset class.
xStock Data Streams Powered By Chainlink
Integrated into Kamino earlier this year, Chainlink is the official provider of xStocks price feeds on Kamino. Having recently joined the xStocks Alliance as the official oracle infrastructure provider, Chainlink is developing a bespoke xStocks oracle solution that delivers market data onchain with high accuracy, and sub-second price latency, significantly enhancing the ability to verify corporate actions in near real time.
Chainlink Data Streams’ custom solution for xStocks delivers a CEX-like user experience for xStocks users on Solana, with highly efficient, low-cost onchain execution without sacrificing on security and decentralization. This creates a vertically integrated stack that connects tokenized stocks and ETFs to blockchains, providing Kamino and its users with a robust, reliable data solution.
Novel Pricing Architecture For Next-Gen Assets
Ensuring that assets are correctly priced is fundamental to user safety and platform robustness in DeFi ecosystems. Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network sources prices derived from multiple U.S. equity exchanges, delivering highly reliable and purpose-built Data Streams tailored for lending markets. To enhance overall resiliency, Chainlink has incorporated a real-time market status feed and staleness indicator, giving Kamino the ability to automatically respond to events like trading halts or market outages.
This solution has been architected specifically to ensure that xStock prices on Kamino avoid onchain liquidity constraints.
In an upcoming upgrade, Chainlink will support a new corporate action multiplier developed by Backed Finance. This innovative tool includes a timestamp for upcoming corporate actions and a corresponding multiplier that reflects their expected impact on the assets price.
To further strengthen price integrity outside regular trading hours, Kamino has introduced a price band mechanism for xStocks. During low liquidity periods, such as weekends & evenings where prices are static and pre and post periods where prices are volatile, Kamino accepts prices streamed by Chainlink, provided that prices fall within a custom percentage deviation range of the asset price at last market close. This approach protects users borrowing against their xStocks from excessive price volatility and reduces the risk of liquidations when traditional markets are closed.
Kamino’s pricing engine is evolving to price assets beyond the 24/7 markets that are emblematic of crypto assets, into the traditional asset space that carries with it far more complexities, with variables such as market hours, trading halts, and corporate actions, to name a few.
The Evolution of Permissionless Finance
We believe that this launch ushers in a new era for our industry, and is just the beginning of a shift that will see trillions of dollars in assets move from traditional finance into onchain ecosystems.
In collaboration with Chainlink, Backed, Solana, and many others, Kamino aims to push the boundaries of what’s possible in DeFi.
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Note that Kamino products are not available to US, UK, nor any other restricted jurisdictions are per our terms.