Kamino debuts AUTO, a permissionless token tied to U.S. auto loans
Tech & Launches ·
The Solana lending platform has opened access to a new real-world-asset market pegged to near-prime American auto credit, a sector valued at $1.68T.
Kamino announced the token, called AUTO, as live and exclusively available through its own platform, according to a post on X. The asset is described as the first permissionless RWA product tied to yield generated by near-prime auto loans in the U.S., a category the company frames as one of the largest and most established credit markets globally, with a long history of securitization data behind it.
The structure behind AUTO involves several named partners. Agora Data originated the underlying loans and is described as an established acquirer of consumer auto credit, holding a $100M warehouse facility and a public securitization record supported by third-party-validated performance figures. Figure Forge is credited with powering and diligencing the structure; Figure itself is identified as the largest non-bank originator of HELOCs in the country, having funded more than $25B in loans. Issuance of the token falls to HastraFi, with the entire mechanism running on Solana and made composable through Kamino's infrastructure. Price and data feeds for the market rely on Chainlink's data streams.
A notable feature of the design is its separation from existing crypto-collateral risk. The auto loan yield underlying AUTO is described as structurally uncorrelated both to crypto-backed collateral broadly and to the home equity yield behind Kamino's existing PRIME product, positioning AUTO as a diversification play within the platform's RWA lineup rather than a variation on the same risk profile.
The launch is part of a broader trend of tokenizing large traditional credit markets onto public blockchains, a theme also tracked in coverage of Solana's expanding role in real-world-asset infrastructure, as noted by leviathan.news. By bringing a slice of the $1.68T auto credit market onchain, Kamino is testing whether permissionless access to yield from an established, non-crypto asset class can attract capital without requiring correlated exposure to digital-asset volatility.
What remains unclear is the initial size of the AUTO market, the terms offered to depositors, and how quickly loan performance data will be reflected onchain through the Chainlink feeds. Also unresolved is how the token's risk and return will compare in practice to PRIME once both products operate simultaneously on Kamino, and how the involvement of Agora Data and Figure Forge will be structured over time as loan portfolios mature.