Kamino opens USDC Borrowing against GPU loan Yields on Solana

Kamino has opened a Solana lending market where holders can post sUSDai as collateral and borrow USDC at up to 80% loan-to-value, with liquidations starting at 85%. The yield underneath that collateral is paid by a loan book of more than $280 million across 16 loans that finance GPU hardware for AI data centres.

For a holder, the practical effect is straightforward. sUSDai is now usable as collateral on Solana, so anyone holding the token can borrow USDC against it without selling, or loop the position to multiply both yield and liquidation risk.

What sUSDai is

According to USD.AI's documentation, USDai is minted against deposited stablecoins and backed by PYUSD. Staking USDai returns sUSDai, and the yield accrues through the exchange rate between the two, which is why sUSDai was priced at about $1.11 on its Solana launch day rather than $1.

USD.AI's docs name two income streams behind that yield: interest paid by GPU operators and Treasury-bill returns on reserve capital.

How the GPU loan book is structured

Kamino framed the launch as "compute-backed credit" arriving on Solana. Each loan sits inside a bankruptcy-remote special purpose vehicle, a separate legal entity that stays ring-fenced if the borrower fails. The SPV holds the GPU hardware, the offtake contract, the colocation agreement and the revenue accounts, with USD.AI holding a first-priority claim.

Lent capital stays in escrow with Wilmington Trust until the hardware is installed and independently verified. Loans amortize over three years, which Kamino says takes a 70% starting loan-to-value ratio down to roughly 40% within the first year, a deliberate cushion against GPUs losing resale value as newer chips arrive.

The newest facility is a $128.9 million deal for 32 NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 systems, or 2,304 GPUs, in British Columbia, Canada, announced on 23 September and described by USD.AI as its largest facility to date. The terms are 6.5% yield while the funds sit in escrow and 9% once funded, over a three-year term.

The Kamino market and its hooks

Allez Labs, which describes itself as a DeFi-native risk and growth advisory and a core contributor to Kamino, curated the market. The opening parameters, as Allez Labs posted them: maximum loan-to-value of 80%, liquidation threshold of 85%, a supply cap of 5,000,000 sUSDai and a USDC borrow cap of 5,000,000 USDC. Allez Labs also said the parameters may change as the market matures.

Kamino allocated $75,000 in rewards to USDC suppliers and borrowers over the next two months, and eligible positions earn ALLO points with extra incentives across Solana markets for eight weeks after launch.

Jupiter Earn added three sUSDai vaults on day one: sUSDai-USDC, sUSDai-JupUSD and an sUSDai-USDC/USDC Smart Vault, where the collateral also earns trading fees. Jupiter Lend had $2.41 billion in total deposits as of 22 September. Jupiter Earn said it will seed $10 million of DEX liquidity for sUSDai on the Jupiter Lend AMM through its Liquidity-as-a-Service program.

Kamino's Multiply product can loop sUSDai in one click: borrow USDC against sUSDai, buy more sUSDai and repeat. Jupiter Earn's launch post promoted that loop as "up to 35% APY," a figure tied to launch incentives rather than the underlying sUSDai yield. The same post called sUSDai "the $600M+ yield-bearing dollar," a figure that covers USD.AI across all chains rather than Solana alone.

The risks, in Allez Labs' own words

Allez Labs put the risk plainly in a follow-up post: sUSDai "carries credit and liquidity risk alongside smart-contract and liquidation risk," and the return is not guaranteed. The looping path on Kamino Multiply multiplies both the yield and the exposure to liquidation.

By 20:24 UTC on 24 September, Solana Compass tracked about 8.43 million sUSDai on Solana, worth roughly $9.39 million, spread across 36 holder wallets, with about $372,000 of DEX volume in the trailing 24 hours. The base sUSDai yield and the exact borrow or supply APYs on the Kamino Allez market at launch are not stated on the pages we could read.

Where this fits

The launch extends a run of isolated Kamino markets built around non-crypto collateral. Re's reUSD market, backed by a reinsurance portfolio, crossed $20 million eight days after it opened in August, and on 23 September Kamino launched a tGBP market for tokenized sterling. The pattern: each new market pulls a different real-world yield source into Solana's DeFi stack, and each one carries its own legal, custodial and counterparty structure.