Chaos at MarginFi Shakes up Solana DeFi’s Borrow-and-Lend Landscape

The biggest winner from MarginFi’s leadership shakeup seems to be Solend, with $17 million in deposits in the last 24 hours and token rising 37%.

Kamino, another competitor, also saw $81 million in new deposits.

MarginFi is still Solana’s second-largest borrow and lend service and fifth-largest DeFi protocol by TVL despite seeing a 31% deposit exodus in a single day.

Wednesday’s leadership chaos at MarginFi sparked an exodus of $200 million in crypto capital from the borrow-and-lend service. Rather than staying on the sidelines, those coins are now flowing into competing platforms on the Solana blockchain.

The biggest winner appears to be Solend. In the past 24 hours, it has seen deposits worth $17 million, its largest single-day deposit jump since July 2022. Solend’s deposits increased nearly 12% in a single day, and its token rallied 37% over the same period.

These spikes come after Solend’s leader, the pseudonymous 0xRooter, offered a token airdrop to lenders who moved their money from MarginFi to his platform, one of the oldest borrow-and-lend outposts in Solana DeFi.

By sheer numbers, Kamino saw the largest jump of $81 million in new deposits, or 8.5% in a single day, per DeFi Llama. It doesn’t have a token yet but is expected to airdrop one to its users later this month. Before the chaos began, Kamino had already jumped MarginFi to become Solana’s largest borrow-and-lend platform.

Drift saw a modest increase of $3.38 million in deposits. It runs a combined platform that offers borrow-and-lend, yield-generating strategies and perpetual futures exchange services.

MarginFi remains Solana’s second-largest borrow and lend service and fifth-largest DeFi protocol by TVL despite a 31% deposit exodus in a single day. The fiery resignation of its longtime CEO Edgar Pavlovsky leaves its immediate leadership structure and future uncertain, though its on-chain programs continue to run as designed.

MarginFi’s longtime leader, Edgar Pavlovsky, resigned Wednesday following an internal dispute at the protocol’s builder, mrgn. After his departure, the remaining team at MRGN group appeared to have addressed an issue with the protocol’s price data infrastructure that had caused issues for withdrawals for over a month.

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