How to Lend and Borrow on Solana: Best Platforms (2026)

How Solana lending and borrowing works

On Solana you lend by putting tokens into a pool that borrowers pay interest into. You borrow by locking up collateral worth more than the loan. Lending is the simplest part of DeFi on Solana, and apps call it “Earn”. The rate is a variable APY, so it moves all the time with demand. You can withdraw whenever you like, as long as the pool isn’t fully lent out.

Borrowing works the other way round. LTV (loan-to-value) is your loan as a share of your collateral, so $5,000 borrowed against $10,000 of SOL is 50% LTV. Every market has a max LTV (the most it lets you borrow) and a higher liquidation threshold. Cross the threshold and part of your SOL gets sold to repay the loan, and you pay a liquidation penalty on the part that’s sold. Jupiter calls how close you are “position health”. Kamino shows your LTV next to a “liquidation LTV”.

Best Solana lending platforms (October 2026)

Kamino Lend and Jupiter Lend are the two big Solana lending protocols, and they’re now close in size: $1.34B and $1.15B in TVL, over 90% of the TVL in this table.

Protocol	TVL	Borrowed	Best for	The catch
Kamino Lend	$1.34B	$946M	LSTs, Multiply loops, curated vaults	More markets and screens to understand
Jupiter Lend	$1.15B	$1.04B	First USDC deposit, borrowing against SOL	Big withdrawals can be limited when the pool is busy
Save (formerly Solend)	$90M	$161M	People already using it	Much smaller; little reason to start here
Loopscale	$86M	$50M	Fixed-rate, fixed-term loans	Smaller pools, less liquidity
Project 0 (formerly marginfi)	$65M	$25M	One margin account across venues	Another layer of smart contracts on top

Figures as of 12 October 2026. On DefiLlama, TVL leaves out money that’s already lent out, so the total supplied is roughly TVL plus borrowed: about $2.3B at Kamino and $2.2B at Jupiter Lend. That’s also why Save shows more borrowed than TVL.

Rates on the day: lending USDC paid a little over 5% on Jupiter Lend, rewards included, and about 4.7% in Kamino’s main market. Borrowing USDC against SOL cost about 6% at both. These move constantly, so compare the live rate in each app before you deposit.

Used Drift or marginfi? Claiming DFX and finding your positions

Drift was hacked on 1 April 2026 and came back as Velocity, a perps-first exchange I wouldn’t lend on, because lending isn’t what it’s built for now. If you had funds on Drift that day, connect that wallet on Drift’s DFX claim page (dfx.drift.trade) and claim DFX before 00:00 UTC on 1 January 2028. Unclaimed DFX is burned. You get 1 DFX per dollar of verified loss. Each DFX currently redeems for about 1 cent, and Velocity revenue tops up the pool daily. The Drift DFX section of our perp DEX comparison covers redemption and the Tether pledge.
marginfi is now Project 0. You manage old positions in the Project 0 app (app.0.xyz). Points and the rename are covered in our marginfi (now Project 0) guide.

How to lend USDC on Solana, step by step

Any self-custody Solana wallet works. I’d use Solflare or Jupiter’s own wallet (my wallet picks). Keep about 0.05 SOL for fees on top of what you deposit (need SOL first?). USDC on another chain? Bridge it over first.
Go to jup.ag/lend and pick the Earn tab. Check the URL before you connect your wallet.
Pick USDC and read the APY. It’s the supply rate borrowers pay you plus any rewards, which can stop at any time, so judge the deposit on the base part.
Type an amount (or press MAX or HALF), click Deposit and approve one signature.
Check your wallet for jlUSDC, your receipt (you can confirm it on a Solana block explorer). You’ll get fewer jlUSDC than the USDC you put in, because each one grows in value as interest builds up. It’s your claim on the deposit, so don’t send it away.
To withdraw, open the vault, go to the Withdraw tab, enter an amount and approve. There’s no lock-up, but when a pool is busy Jupiter shows how much you can take out right now, so a big exit may need several withdrawals.

Kamino works the same way, and our Kamino Earn walkthrough goes through it screen by screen. For more than plain lending pools, see where stablecoins earn most on Solana.

Lending SOL instead? It paid about 4% at both venues on the same day. A liquid staking token (LST) like JupSOL or jitoSOL earns staking rewards and still works as collateral, so compare the two first. Here’s native versus liquid staking.

How to borrow against Solana (SOL), step by step

Open Jupiter Lend’s Borrow tab, choose the SOL/USDC vault and deposit your SOL. Your first deposit also pays one-off network rent: about 0.015 SOL for the position’s metadata account, plus roughly 0.004 SOL for the NFT and tick accounts. Jupiter charges no protocol fee on top of your interest (see our Jupiter guide). JupSOL holders can use the JupSOL/USDC vault instead (75% max LTV, 80% threshold, 5% liquidation penalty, so divide by 0.80 below).
Read the vault’s numbers. On 12 October SOL/USDC showed 80% max LTV, an 85% liquidation threshold, a 90% liquidation max limit and a 1% liquidation penalty. Check them on screen.
Borrow about half your SOL’s value. I’d keep LTV at 50% or lower, even though the app will let you take 80%. Write down the liquidation price the app shows for your amount. To work it out yourself: today’s SOL price × (your LTV ÷ 0.85). At 50% LTV, that’s about 59% of today’s price.
Set an alert. Put a SOL price alert in an app like CoinGecko or TradingView about halfway to your liquidation price (at 50% LTV on SOL/USDC, roughly 20% below today), so you have time to add SOL or repay.
Repay and withdraw. Repay the USDC (interest included), then withdraw your SOL.

Annotated Jupiter Lend Borrow screen for the SOL/USDC vault showing 80% max LTV, 85% liquidation threshold, 90% liquidation max limit, 1% penalty, liquidation price, position health and account rent — The numbers to check on Jupiter Lend's SOL/USDC vault before you borrow.

If your LTV crosses 85%, liquidators only sell enough SOL to bring you back to the threshold, and you pay the 1% penalty on what’s sold. If a fast drop takes you past the 90% max limit, the whole position is liquidated. Kamino works on the same idea: in the main market you can borrow up to 74% against SOL. The number that matters is the liquidation LTV shown next to it.

Worked example: $10,000 of SOL, $5,000 USDC borrowed

Settings as above: 80% max, 85% threshold, 90% max limit, 1% penalty. The LTV columns ignore any liquidation along the way. Position health tracks the same thing: how close this LTV is to 85%.

SOL falls	SOL now worth	LTV, $5,000 borrowed	LTV, $7,500 borrowed
0%	$10,000	50%	75%
10%	$9,000	55.6%	83.3%: 1.7 points from partial liquidation
20%	$8,000	62.5%	93.8%: past the 90% max limit
35%	$6,500	76.9%	already liquidated
45%	$5,500	90.9%: past the max limit	already liquidated

Line chart of LTV as SOL falls 0 to 45 percent: a $5,000 loan on $10,000 of SOL goes from 50% to 90.9%, while a $7,500 loan hits partial liquidation after about a 12% drop — How LTV rises as SOL falls: $5,000 and $7,500 borrowed against $10,000 of SOL on Jupiter Lend's SOL/USDC vault.

On the $5,000 loan, partial liquidation starts once SOL is down about 41%. Each $1,000 of SOL sold then costs you about $10 in penalty. Past a 44% drop you’re at the 90% max limit, and if SOL gaps down that far in one move, everything goes.

Say SOL is down 35% and you’re at 76.9%. Liquidation is only about a 10% drop away. Repay $1,000 and you’re at 61.5%, with about 28% of room. Add $1,000 of SOL instead and you’re at 66.7%, with about 22%. Repaying buys more room per dollar.

Now borrow $7,500 (75% LTV) on the same SOL. Partial liquidation starts after a drop of only about 12%. Borrow the full 80% and it’s about 6%. Borrowing the max is how people get wiped on an ordinary red day.

Interest creeps up too: $5,000 at about 6% adds roughly $300 a year, so your LTV rises even if SOL doesn’t move.

Why your rate changes (and why any rate here goes stale)

On 12 October, Kamino’s main USDC pool was about 94% lent out: of roughly $121M supplied, only about $7.7M could be withdrawn. That share is utilisation. Basically, the busier the pool, the more borrowers pay, and past the kink (set per pool, often 80% or higher) the rate shoots up to pull deposits back in. At 100%, lenders wait until someone repays. That’s why every rate here is dated, and our comparison has live rates for both side by side.

Going further: loops, Smart Collateral, cross-venue margin, fixed rates

Kamino Multiply loops an LST: deposit jitoSOL, borrow SOL, buy more jitoSOL, repeat. Once SOL’s borrow rate rises above the staking yield, the loop earns less than just holding jitoSOL, and a sudden rate jump can force you to unwind.

Jupiter Lend v2 Smart Collateral and Smart Debt put your collateral or your debt into a pool of two correlated tokens, like SOL/JupSOL or USDC/USDT, so it also earns swap fees. With Smart Collateral, if one token depegs, the pool shifts your collateral toward the weaker one and you take the loss.

Project 0 lets you use deposits on Kamino and Jupiter Lend as collateral in one margin account, at the cost of one more contract layer.

Loopscale matches lenders and borrowers at a fixed rate, for terms from 1 day to 3 months. It’s much smaller and less liquid, and its merger with Orca still depends on an ORCA tokenholder vote.

How lenders and borrowers lose money here

Liquidation. The big one for borrowers. The worked example shows the fix: a lower LTV plus an alert.
Rate spikes. A pool that suddenly gets heavily used can push your borrow rate up within hours.
Oracle glitches. A bad price feed can trigger liquidations that shouldn’t happen. The only thing that protects you is a big gap between the SOL price and your liquidation price.
Protocol risk. What happened at Drift is why I’d split anything big between Kamino and Jupiter Lend: people who had funds there are getting back about 1 cent per dollar so far.

Keep some SOL in the wallet so you can still repay during a crash, when fees spike. Before a bigger deposit, go through these Solana wallet security habits.

Which Solana lending platform should you use?

First USDC deposit: Jupiter Lend Earn. One tab, one signature, no lock-up.
SOL holder who wants USDC: Jupiter Lend’s SOL/USDC vault, kept at about 50% LTV.
Natively staked SOL and you want USDC: Jupiter’s native staked SOL vaults only let you borrow SOL, not USDC. Unstake first (up to about 2 days) and borrow against plain SOL, or stake into JupSOL and use the JupSOL/USDC vault.
Holding jitoSOL or other LSTs, or want Multiply loops: Kamino.
Already using both Kamino and Jupiter Lend: Project 0.
Want a fixed rate for a set term: Loopscale.
Save: only if you already have a position there.

FAQ

Can you borrow against Solana on Coinbase?
Yes. Since 12 May 2026, Coinbase lends up to $100,000 in USDC against SOL to eligible US customers outside New York. It runs through Morpho on Base: max 70% LTV, liquidated at 86%, and the SOL sits in a Morpho contract you manage from the Coinbase app, not in your own Solana wallet. To use the on-chain route instead, first send your SOL from Coinbase to your own wallet.

Is Kamino or Jupiter Lend safer?
Neither is risk-free, and I wouldn’t call one safer. They’re the two largest, so they have the most liquidity when you need to get out.

Can you get a Solana loan without collateral?
Only as a flash loan, which a program has to repay in the same transaction. It’s a tool for bots and arbitrage. You can’t walk away with the money.

Not financial advice. I explain how these tools work and what they cost me; check the details yourself before moving money. Last reviewed 12 Oct 2026.

Key takeaways