Save (formerly Solend): What Changed and Current Yield Opportunities

The Short Version

Save is Solend under a new name. Same protocol that launched permissionless lending on Solana in 2021, same isolated-pool architecture, rebranded to Save in 2024 after the governance episode that made it briefly famous for the wrong reasons.

At its peak Solend was the largest lender on Solana, the default place to park stablecoins and borrow against SOL. Today Save holds roughly $71M in supplied TVL. It is no longer the biggest, no longer the highest-paying, and no longer the story everyone is watching. It is a working protocol that survived the events that killed its reputation.

This post pulls the live supply yields, reads them straight, and looks at what the rebrand actually changed. If you are weighing a deposit, the honest answer is that Save pays below the top of the market on almost everything, and the reason to use it is not rate. It is the isolated-pool structure and a codebase that has been running since 2021.

What Actually Happened

Solend's problem was never a hack. It was a governance vote that undercut the entire pitch of decentralized lending.

In June 2022 one wallet had deposited about 5.7 million SOL, more than 95% of all deposits on the protocol, and borrowed roughly $108M in USDC and USDT against it. SOL was falling. If the position hit its liquidation price, the on-chain unwind would have been large enough to cause chaos across Solana DEX liquidity and potentially leave Solend with bad debt.

On June 19, 2022 the team put up SLND1: Mitigate Risk From Whale, a proposal granting emergency powers to take control of the whale's wallet and liquidate the position over the counter instead of on the open market. It passed with 97.5% approval, clearing a 1% quorum by a hair.

The backlash was immediate. A DeFi protocol voting to seize a user's wallet is the opposite of what permissionless lending is supposed to mean, no matter how good the reason. Within a day the team ran SLND2, which invalidated the first vote and extended governance voting windows from 6 hours to 1 day. One wallet paid about $700K in voting power to swing it, which did not exactly help the decentralization narrative either.

The position resolved without the takeover. But the reputational damage stuck, and it sat on top of a harder market. Solend rode out the FTX collapse in November 2022 and the depegs and drawdowns that followed. TVL never returned to its old highs. The 2024 rebrand to Save was the clean break: new name, broader product, and distance from the SLND governance headlines.

What Save Is Now

Strip the branding and the product is a lending protocol with two design choices worth understanding.

The first is isolated pools. Instead of one shared pool where every asset backs every borrow, Save runs separate markets with their own risk parameters. The main pool holds blue-chip collateral. Riskier or newer tokens sit in their own isolated markets. If a long-tail asset gets liquidated badly, the damage stays contained instead of cascading into the USDC market. This is the structural lesson every Solana lender eventually learned, and Save was early to it.

The second is permissionless pool creation. Anyone can spin up a lending market for a token pair through a no-code tool. That is why Save's pool list runs to dozens of markets, most of them tiny. It also means you need to read which pool you are actually depositing into, because a headline rate on a thin isolated market is not the same risk as the main USDC pool.

On top of the lending core, Save added SUSD, its own stablecoin, and saveSOL, a liquid staking token. These broaden the product but the lending markets are still where a depositor's yield comes from.

Live Supply Yields

These are the current supply APYs on the main Solana markets, pulled from on-chain data on July 7, 2026. APY here is the base lending rate paid to suppliers. It floats with utilization, so treat these as a snapshot.

Total supplied TVL on Solana is about $71M, with roughly $147M in outstanding borrows against it through looping and recursive positions.

Two things to read carefully.

First, the stablecoin rates are low. USDC at 2.35% and USDT at 1.36% sit well below what Kamino and the order-book venues pay on the same assets, where stables clear 4% and up. Save is not competing on rate here. Its stablecoin markets carry lower utilization and more conservative parameters, and the yield reflects that.

Second, the LST pools look like they pay nothing, and that is a reporting artifact, not a dead deposit. mSOL, bSOL, and jitoSOL show near-zero lending APY because they are held as collateral, not lent out for interest. The yield is already inside the token, roughly 6 to 8% of staking return, and the tiny lending rate would sit on top of it. Save's biggest pools by TVL are LST collateral, which tells you what people mainly use the protocol for: posting staked SOL to borrow against, not chasing a supply rate.

So the picture is not "Save is broken." It is "Save pays below-market on stables, and its largest pools are staked-SOL collateral where the yield was never in the lending market to begin with."

The Security Picture

Save's contracts have the longest continuous track record of any lending protocol on Solana. Live since 2021 as Solend, audited by Kudelski Security and OtterSec, and battle-tested through the FTX collapse, the 2022 whale crisis, and multiple market crashes without a protocol-level exploit. On code maturity alone that is a strong record, and it is the part that pulls Save's score up.

The counterweight is governance, and it is specific to Save. The 2022 SLND1 vote showed that under enough pressure, the DAO was willing to reach into a user's wallet, and that a single well-funded wallet could dominate a vote. Governance windows were lengthened afterward, but the episode is a permanent line in the risk profile. It is the reason Save's grade is not purely a function of its clean exploit history.

There is also concentration to watch. Save has lived through a 95%-of-deposits-in-one-wallet situation before. Thin TVL and a few large positions mean utilization and liquidation risk can move fast if one holder exits. Isolated pools contain contagion between markets, but they do not fix concentration inside a single market.

You can see the live grade and the full breakdown on the Save protocol page, and read how the scores are built on our security methodology.

Where It Fits

Context is the whole story. Kamino runs $2 to $3B in TVL and sets the default rate on Solana. Save at $71M is a smaller, older, more conservative venue that trades yield for a structure it has proven over four years.

That trade is not for everyone. If you are chasing the best stablecoin rate, Save is not it, and the yields page will show you deeper pools paying nearly double on USDC. If you want to post staked SOL as collateral inside isolated markets on a codebase with a long track record, Save earns a look, and the concentration and governance history are the two things to size around.

The permissionless pools are a genuine feature and a genuine footgun. A high rate on an isolated Save market can be real yield or a thin pool one liquidation away from trouble. Read which pool you are in before you deposit, and run the number against alternatives with the calculator.

Bottom Line

Save did not fail and it did not reclaim the top either. It rebranded away from the governance episode that defined Solend, kept the isolated-pool design that was ahead of its time, and settled into a smaller, quieter role in Solana lending.

The yields today are modest and below market. Stables pay 1 to 3%. The LST pools pay through the token, not the lending market. The contracts are the most seasoned on the chain, and the governance history is the asterisk on that record.

If you use Save, use it for the structure and the track record, not the rate, and keep the 2022 lesson in mind about what a lending DAO will do when one position gets too big. Check the live security scores before you commit.

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Supply APY and TVL figures pulled from on-chain lending data and verified against DeFiLlama as of July 7, 2026. TVL currently sits near $71M supplied on Solana with roughly $147M in outstanding borrows. Governance history (SLND1 and SLND2, June 2022) sourced from contemporaneous reporting. Security grade derived from yieldwire's scoring methodology. Yields float with utilization and change continuously. This is not financial advice.