Sanctum

Sanctum is the core liquid staking infrastructure layer for the Solana ecosystem, built by Igneous Labs. Founded in 2023 by Jesse Cho, FP Lee, and Jaye Tan — veterans of Rust engineering, the Solana Foundation's SPL stake pool programme, and blockchain law respectively — Sanctum set out to solve one of Solana's most persistent DeFi challenges: the fragmented liquidity problem that makes most liquid staking tokens (LSTs) illiquid in practice.

The LST Liquidity Problem

Liquid staking tokens represent staked SOL that can be used in DeFi while continuing to earn staking rewards. The catch is that each LST is issued by a different validator or protocol, meaning liquidity is scattered across dozens of separate pools. A newer LST with only a few million dollars of TVL has almost no DEX liquidity, making it difficult to exit quickly without significant price impact. Sanctum was built to fix this at the infrastructure level.

Core Architecture

Sanctum's solution rests on three interlocking components.

The Reserve Pool is the foundational backstop. It holds deep SOL liquidity that can be used to honour instant unstake requests for any LST integrated with Sanctum. Rather than waiting out the standard two-to-three epoch (~four to six day) Solana unbonding period, users can redeem their LST for SOL immediately, with Sanctum absorbing the timing risk. The reserve pool acts as an emergency liquidity layer that makes every integrated LST effectively liquid at any time.

The LST Router is the swap layer built on top of that liquidity. It allows users to buy, sell, or swap between any Sanctum-integrated LST with minimal slippage and without requiring a traditional two-asset AMM pool for each token pair. Because all LSTs share the same underlying collateral (staked SOL), the router can price swaps accurately using on-chain stake account data rather than relying on spot market depth.

Infinity (INF) is Sanctum's flagship yield product and the most technically novel part of the protocol. Rather than a conventional single-validator LST, INF is a multi-LST liquidity pool. Users deposit any supported LST (or SOL) and receive INF tokens representing a proportional share of the entire pool. INF then earns yield from two sources simultaneously: the weighted-average staking rewards from all LSTs held in the pool, and the trading fees generated whenever users swap between LSTs through Sanctum's router. A dynamic fee structure adjusts based on each LST's share of the pool, incentivising rebalancing trades that reduce concentration risk while generating additional fee income. INF has consistently ranked among the highest-yielding LSTs on Solana, reaching a 6.42% APY in January 2026.

Staking-as-a-Service

Beyond its consumer-facing products, Sanctum operates a Staking-as-a-Service platform that allows any project or validator to launch a branded, custom LST in minutes. The permissionless LST factory handles the underlying stake pool mechanics and integrates the new token into Sanctum's router and reserve liquidity from day one, meaning even a newly minted LST has instant liquidity.

This model has attracted major ecosystem partners. Jupiter launched jupSOL through Sanctum's infrastructure, as did Bybit (bbSOL), Crypto.com (cdcSOL), Drift (dSOL), and DeFi Dev Corp (dfdvSOL). In December 2025, Nasdaq-listed Forward Industries converted 25% of its 6.9 million SOL treasury into liquid form through a Sanctum-powered fwdSOL. As of late 2025, Sanctum had processed the creation of over 1,360 LSTs and generated more than $5 million in cumulative partner revenue from the programme.

Scale and TVL

Sanctum's total value locked across its Validator LST programme and the Infinity pool reached approximately $1.2 billion as of 2026, making it one of the largest staking protocols on Solana by TVL. Its broader infrastructure — including the Gateway transaction delivery service (350,000 transactions delivered) and the Ironforge Web3 DevOps platform (300 million API requests daily) — extends its footprint well beyond pure staking.

Context matters here: as of November 2025, only 13.76% of all staked SOL resided in LSTs, representing roughly 60.5 million SOL or approximately $10 billion. Sanctum sits at the centre of that market, providing the shared liquidity rails that make the rest of the LST ecosystem viable.

CLOUD Token

Sanctum's governance token, CLOUD, launched in July 2024 via Jupiter's LFG Launchpad. With a fixed maximum supply of 1 billion tokens and approximately 494 million in circulation, CLOUD grants holders voting rights over protocol decisions through a governance mechanism the team calls Funtarchy. Holding CLOUD is also required to participate in the Sanctum Verified Partner programme, which gates access to co-marketing and featured placement for LST issuers. The token distribution allocated 20% to airdrops and liquidity, 30% to community initiatives, 25% to the team, 13% to early investors, 11% to a strategic reserve, and 1% to Jupiter's launchpad.

Broader Significance

Sanctum's design reflects a specific thesis: that Solana's staking ecosystem is healthiest when stake is distributed across many validators rather than concentrated in a handful of large LST providers. By making it trivially easy to launch a validator LST and by giving every LST instant exit liquidity through the reserve pool, Sanctum lowers the bar for validators to attract delegators and for users to diversify their staking exposure. The Infinity pool then aggregates those diversified positions into a single yield-bearing token that simplifies the experience for end users who don't want to actively manage a portfolio of LSTs.

Built by Igneous Labs and backed by the Solana ecosystem's largest protocols as integration partners, Sanctum has positioned itself as the essential plumbing underneath Solana's liquid staking market.