Solana‘s lending market has gotten a lot more competitive lately, and not just on the usual metrics. Protocols aren’t only fighting over liquidity and borrowing demand anymore. They’re fighting over how efficiently users can put their capital to work across the rest of the ecosystem.
Jupiter’s move into lending is a good example of that shift. Instead of treating lending as its own standalone product, Jupiter Lend is stitching it into the trading infrastructure and liquidity it already runs. Kamino and Save are playing a different game: both are more established lending platforms, each with its own take on how to pull in deposits and borrowers.
As of late August, the scale gap between the three is pretty stark: Kamino at roughly $1.18 billion in TVL, Jupiter Lend at about $1.05 billion, and Save trailing at around $80 million. Kamino also has close to $911 million in active loans. Those numbers are a decent snapshot, but the more interesting question is how each platform is approaching lending and where it fits into what they’re trying to build.
Jupiter Lend
Jupiter walked into lending with something most new protocols don’t have: an existing audience. It was already one of the main places people went to trade on Solana, so it didn’t need to build a lending user base from zero. It already had one. That head start shows. According to DefiLlama, Lend currently holds roughly $1.05 billion in TVL and about $906.79 million in active loans.
But the more telling part is what Jupiter’s doing with that liquidity.
Lend v2, which launched August 10, introduced two new mechanics: Smart Collateral and Smart Debt. Smart Collateral lets certain deposited assets earn lending yield and double as trading liquidity, generating swap fees on the side. Smart Debt works the other direction: trading fees from eligible borrowed assets can chip away at the cost of borrowing them. Both are opt-in, and both only apply to a limited set of eligible assets.
It’s a genuinely different pitch than traditional lending. Jupiter is trying to merge two things that have mostly lived in separate lanes on-chain: lending capital and providing trading liquidity.
Worth flagging, though. The extra yield only shows up if trading activity actually flows through the relevant pools, and Jupiter hasn’t published a target rate or made any guarantees. So this is best thought of as a potential upside, not a fixed boost to lending returns.
Kamino
Kamino is the biggest name in Solana lending right now, and it’s the natural benchmark for judging how Jupiter Lend is doing. At roughly $1.18 billion in TVL with about $911 million in active loans, compared to Jupiter Lend’s roughly $1.05 billion in TVL by the same measure. That’s still a real gap, but Jupiter’s already close enough that the comparison actually means something.
Kamino got there by staying focused. It built a lending, liquidity, and leverage product rather than bolting lending onto a broader consumer finance app, and the whole suite is built around putting deposited capital to work.
That’s really what separates the two. This isn’t just about who has more TVL today. Kamino is the more mature, more specialized approach to Solana lending. Jupiter is coming at the same market from the opposite angle, folding lending into an ecosystem that already touches trading, routing, staking, and more.
For users, that translates into two genuinely different bets. Kamino offers the depth and focus of a platform built specifically around lending and liquidity. Jupiter is betting that distribution, plus the ability to link lending to trading, beats specialization on its own.
Save
Save, formerly Solend, is the third data point here, and it tells a different story. It’s one of the oldest names in Solana lending and has been through several cycles of the market, but its current scale is nowhere near Kamino’s or Jupiter’s.
Save hovers at around $80 million in TVL, a fraction of Kamino’s $1.18 billion or Jupiter Lend’s $1.05 billion. Its model is the classic one: deposit assets to earn interest, use supported assets as collateral to borrow. No extra layers, no integration with a broader platform. Just lending.
Save is useful mainly as a reminder of how fast this market moves. Being early and lasting through multiple cycles counts for something, but capital and borrowing demand go where the incentives are. Jupiter’s rapid rise and Kamino’s current lead both show how quickly the pecking order can shift once a newer entrant brings better distribution, new mechanics, or deeper liquidity.
Three Different Bets on the Same Market
Put Jupiter, Kamino, and Save side by side and it’s clear Solana lending isn’t just a contest between near-identical protocols anymore. Kamino leads on TVL, Jupiter is closing in surprisingly fast for how new it is, and Save operates at a much smaller scale while representing the older, more traditional model that got this category started.
The real difference is in what each one is trying to do with the capital it pulls in. Save treats lending as its own thing. Kamino has stretched that into a full lending-liquidity-leverage platform. Jupiter is going further still, tying lending directly to the trading activity already happening across its ecosystem.
TVL alone doesn’t capture any of that. Deposits tell you where people are willing to park capital. Active loans tell you whether that capital is actually being used. Product design tells you what else it can do once it’s there.
Does the Integration Actually Give Jupiter an Edge?
This is the question that matters most for Jupiter Lend. Jupiter already runs the routing infrastructure that finds the best trading prices across Solana, on top of its own liquidity pools.
Lend v2 means trading activity can now feed directly into the economics of its lending product.
On paper, that’s a flywheel: more users bring more liquidity, more trading activity creates more fee opportunities for eligible liquidity, and better economics make depositing or borrowing more attractive. Whether that actually plays out is still an open question.
Jupiter has said publicly that its router doesn’t favor its own pools and still routes swaps to whatever offers the best price. That matters, since any edge here would have to come from Jupiter winning trading flow on its merits, not from routing traffic to itself.
The early numbers are promising, and since launching Lend v2 on August 10, Jupiter Lend has climbed to roughly $1.05 billion in TVL with about $906.79 million in active loans. That’s still an early signal rather than proof that Lend v2 has changed the protocol’s trajectory.
What Comes Next
Going forward, this won’t just be a race to the highest TVL. Kamino still leads, Jupiter has emerged as its closest rival faster than almost anyone expected, and Save shows how far the market has moved from the earlier generation of standalone Solana lending protocols toward platforms competing on product breadth and distribution.
For Jupiter, the test is whether tying lending to trading produces real, sustained growth in deposits and borrowing, not just a short-term bump. For Kamino, it’s whether scale and specialization are enough to hold off Jupiter’s expansion. And Save is a good reminder that nothing in DeFi lending stays fixed for long.
There’s probably no single “best” protocol here. It depends on what a given user actually wants. But it’s getting clearer that Solana lending is turning into something bigger than a rivalry between similar products. It’s becoming a contest between different theories of what on-chain finance should look like.
Jupiter is betting that trading, liquidity, and lending work better fused. Kamino and Save are the benchmarks that the bet will be measured against.
