Upbit, South Korea's largest cryptocurrency exchange, has listed a KMNO/KRW trading pair for Kamino Finance, giving Korean won holders direct access to the token behind Solana's largest lending and liquidity protocol. The listing opened trading at 1:30 p.m. KST on August 7, extending Kamino's reach into one of the most active retail trading markets in Asia.
Kamino combines a money market for lending and borrowing with automated concentrated-liquidity vaults built on top of Solana decentralized exchanges Orca and Raydium, positioning it as a one-stop DeFi platform for yield and leverage on the network. KMNO functions as the protocol's governance and incentive token, launched via airdrop in April 2024, giving holders voting power over proposals covering protocol upgrades, fee structure changes and treasury allocation. The protocol's total value locked surpassed $950 million in 2025, a 215% increase from the year prior.
A listing that hasn't reversed the token's slide
Despite Kamino's growth in protocol usage, KMNO itself has traded well below its highs — the token peaked near $0.247 in December 2024 before falling more than 90% to lows around $0.0134. That divergence between protocol fundamentals and token price is a familiar pattern in DeFi, where growing TVL and usage don't always translate directly into token appreciation, particularly for governance tokens whose value accrual mechanisms are indirect. This isn't Kamino's first Korean exchange listing either — KMNO listed on Upbit's rival exchange Bithumb earlier in the year, and broadened access there similarly failed to reverse the token's downward trend.
Why the Upbit listing still matters
Even without an immediate price impact, a listing on Upbit is meaningful distribution for any DeFi token, since the exchange commands an outsized share of South Korea's retail trading volume and gives Kamino a direct on-ramp to a market that has historically shown strong appetite for Solana ecosystem tokens. For Kamino, expanding its trading venues broadens the token's liquidity profile even if near-term price action remains disconnected from the protocol's underlying growth.
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