Solana lender Kamino taps fintech veteran Michael Weisz as CEO for massive U.S. expansion

Kamino, one of the larger lending platforms built on Solana, has appointed Michael Weisz as its new chief executive and is establishing a headquarters in New York as part of a strategic shift toward tokenized real-world assets. The company said it is eyeing roughly 20,000 square feet of office space in the city and plans to add a chief financial officer and a head of legal to support its expansion.

Weisz co-founded Yieldstreet (now operating as Willow Wealth), a platform that deployed more than $6 billion in investments alongside traditional firms such as Goldman Sachs, Carlyle, KKR and Ares. His hiring signals Kamino’s intent to deepen connections with asset managers and distribution platforms as it moves beyond crypto-native lending toward products that appeal to institutional counterparties.

Kamino already operates lending markets that let users borrow against crypto and is extending that model to tokenized real-world assets. Its PRIME market, created with Figure Technologies and Hastra, accepts Figure’s blockchain-based home equity loans as collateral; Kamino reported that deposits into PRIME topped $600 million about three months after launch. The firm also provides infrastructure used by Nasdaq-listed Forward Industries and digital asset manager Galaxy for tokenized equity and U.S. Treasury positions.

The company highlighted its operational scale — processing more than $650 billion in transactions over four years — as a foundation for courting Wall Street business. That push comes amid growing interest in tokenization from banks and asset managers, with industry estimates projecting substantial expansion in tokenized securities markets in the coming years. Kamino’s New York presence is intended to place it closer to the institutional capital and distribution networks it says are needed to scale on-chain lending and collateral markets.