Solana Is Becoming The Home Of Onchain Credit Origination | Marius Ciubotariu & Reid Simon

**Marius Ciubotariu** (0:00)
I think we kind of all looked at the past few years and we thought low risk defy is a thing.
And everyone's happy to earning 2.5% or 3% forever. And I just simply don't believe it. Or maybe Solana is more higher risk appetite in general and is more keen to get 11, 12% yield. We found that people are extremely interested in getting this extra yield, as long as they understand the asset.

**Mike Ippolito** (0:26)
Hey everyone, quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode. Nothing said on Bell Curve is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Our guests and I may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed.
All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode of Bell Curve. This is going to be a fun episode. Today, I am joined by Marius, the co-founder at Kamino, and Reid, the president of digital assets at Figure. Guys, welcome.

**Reid Simon** (1:00)
Thanks for having us.

**Marius Ciubotariu** (1:01)
Nice to be here.

**Mike Ippolito** (1:03)
Yeah, guys, this is going to be a really fun one. I haven't done an episode on kind of borrow, lend and defy on Solana a little while. And you guys between Kamino and Prime at Figure are representing a huge amount of TVL and activity growth over on the Solana ecosystem and just super exciting to watch.
So I guess I'm curious because typically a lot of the content, especially on kind of like the defy and borrow lend side, I feel like I end up focusing on Ethereum. So take me into Solana land here. And maybe, Marius, I would love to actually rewind the clock to the inspiration of founding Kamino and then Reid, how did you and Prime find your way into working with Kamino? And talk to me about kind of the differences between Solana and Ethereum here.

**Marius Ciubotariu** (1:51)
Kamino was born about three years ago, kind of out of a need to serve some of the stable coins in Solana. Initially, it was an LP protocol to tokenize LPs. And then once we realized that actually the borough land was not well served, or did fit all the needs, we decided to build our own borough land as well.
It was at a time when basically, Solana was considered basically or just a place of imitation, you know, not very serious builders. It was just in the middle of the Bell Market where lots of people left. And, you know, there was not a lot of excitement about Solana, but we really bought Toli's vision, and we believed that the architecture would allow it to scale. The Bell Market and all the network calls that came with it forged our culture, our personality, and made us resilient, which kind of, I think, allowed us to go through this current Bell Market, if you want to call it like that.
And yeah, we've been building ever since. We've had Kamino Land open on the market for almost two and a half years, the LP protocol for three and a half years. And yeah, the reason why it was all created was to serve DeFi and Solana, because we thought the blockchain will create a lot of economic activity, which is what is happening now, and what we observe with more and more quality assets coming on the chain.

**Reid Simon** (3:30)
And I guess, on my side, so Figures has been at the RWA intersection of TradFi and Credit Origination since 2018
We set out to really rebuild capital markets, but doing so on chain. And so we're vertically integrated across the whole stack from Credit Origination, mostly known for tokenizing Helux on chain, we've done about 22 billion of those to date. We structure the cash flows, and then we also distribute across TradFi and DeFi. And so I think for sort of the earlier years of Figures, a lot of that took place on provenance, connecting users directly on provenance, both in TradFi and in DeFi. And sort of about, I don't know, maybe nine months ago, we decided to branch out to other chains, to reach liquidity sources in other ecosystems. And my own experience with the Kamino team in prior roles, and also sort of the Solana ecosystem, we thought it was a great opportunity to sort of test the product and build out with strong relationships and a strong ecosystem. And I think the results we've had together have been really fantastic and sort of speak to an ecosystem that is really focused on bringing new ways to finance new assets and doing so in a responsible.