How Kamino Turned xStocks Into a Lending Market Most DeFi lending markets spend months trying to hit 50% utilization. @kamino launched a market with xStocks as collateral and quickly hit 92%. That's not an accident. It's the result of a product structure that connects real yield to real demand, reinforced by the right incentives at the right time. Kamino had already built one of Solana's largest lending protocols before xStocks arrived. When tokenized equities went live onchain, the demand for lending and borrowing followed almost immediately. The xStocks market on Kamino Kamino started as a single, monolithic lending market on Solana and has since expanded into modular, asset-specific markets. The xStocks market is one of those: built specifically around xStocks as collateral. The mechanics are straightforward: > Deposit xStocks assets like $SPYx or $QQQx > Borrow USDC or other stablecoins against them > Deploy that capital however you want For traders who want leveraged long exposure to tokenized equities, it's a cheaper alternative to perpetual futures. @DeusNero, core contributor at Kamino, joined Tokenized Talks to walk through the mechanics. On a PerpDEX, funding rates get expensive over time. A position you plan to hold for weeks gets eaten by those rates. On Kamino, the borrow APY is more predictable and generally much lower. "You would prefer to go long or short with lower leverage on Kamino if you're looking to hold a position for a long time," @DeusNero said. As of April 2026, $6.3M USDC was supplied, and $5.75M was borrowed, resulting in a 92% utilization rate. At that level, lenders are generating meaningful yield just by depositing USDC into the market. How users are borrowing against tokenized stocks Most users are running straightforward leveraged longs. They deposit $SPYx or $QQQx, borrow USDC, and redeploy. Some use the structure for pair strategies, going long one tokenized asset while managing short exposure elsewhere. That activity picked up significantly after xPoints launched. Before the program, the market was live but not particularly deep. After, it doubled in size. Kamino's xStocks volume now exceeds what some centralized exchanges are doing with the same assets during an ongoing incentives campaign. The program changed behavior by giving users a reason to put xStocks to work rather than just holding them. Depositing as collateral, borrowing against it, maintaining utilization: all of that became rewarded activity. What this means for tokenized equities in DeFi The Kamino case shows a pattern worth paying attention to. xStocks usage grows when protocols build real products on top of the underlying access. That, paired with a $40,000 in onchain incentives, doubled a lending market that now outperforms two major CEXs on the same assets. At 92% utilization with $6.3M supplied, the market is already constrained. More suppliers means more borrowing capacity, which means more strategies available to traders. That's the next chapter: the same assets, more depth, more use cases built on top.