Sanctum

Sanctum is the liquid staking infrastructure protocol on Solana, providing the shared liquidity layer that makes it economical for any validator, institution, or DeFi application to launch and operate its own branded liquid staking token (LST).

The Problem: Fragmented Liquidity

Liquid staking works by issuing a token that represents a staked SOL position. Holders earn staking rewards while keeping their assets liquid and usable in DeFi. The challenge has always been liquidity: each new LST needs its own deep liquidity pool before it becomes tradeable with low slippage. Building that liquidity independently is expensive and slow, which historically limited the LST market to a handful of well-funded protocols. The result was fragmented liquidity spread across competing tokens, none of them particularly deep.

Sanctum solved this by building shared liquidity infrastructure that all LSTs can draw on simultaneously. Rather than each token bootstrapping its own pool, Sanctum's protocol lets any LST swap against a common reserve. The marginal cost of launching a new LST drops to near zero.

Core Mechanism: The Router and Infinity

Sanctum's two foundational on-chain programs are the Router and Infinity.

The Router is a coordination layer for LST swaps. It handles three primary operations: staking SOL directly into an LST (StakeWrappedSol), swapping between two LSTs by routing through a shared stake account (SwapViaStake), and converting existing stake accounts directly into LST form (DepositStake). The Router is intentionally lightweight — described in Sanctum's documentation as a simple CPI wrapper with no value at risk — and charges no fees for standard staking operations. Withdrawals cost 1 basis point on SOL; stake deposits cost 10 basis points.

Infinity is the shared liquidity pool that underlies the Router. Rather than pricing LSTs against each other with AMM curves, Infinity prices every LST at its intrinsic SOL value as reported by each stake pool's own on-chain accounting. This means swaps execute at fair value with no slippage, even for small or newly launched LSTs. Liquidity providers deposit LSTs into the Infinity pool and receive INF tokens in return. INF accrues both staking rewards from the basket of LSTs held in the pool and a share of swap fees, currently split 90% to LPs and 10% to the protocol vault. The pool held over 620,000 SOL in liquidity as of the most recent documentation, and swap volume has grown in line with the expansion of partner LSTs.

Staking-as-a-Service

In 2025, Sanctum formalized its institutional product under the name Staking-as-a-Service. This offering enables validators, DeFi protocols, exchanges, and other organizations to spin up a custom LST and validator without managing underlying infrastructure. Sanctum handles validator setup, infrastructure maintenance, and automatic listing on key Solana platforms including Jupiter, Titan, and Kamino.

The onboarding cost is a one-time 100 SOL fee, which Sanctum reinvests as initial Infinity liquidity for the first three months — ensuring the new LST has tradeable depth from launch day. Branded LSTs receive priority access to Infinity's shared liquidity pool. Partners have collectively earned over five million dollars in staking-derived revenue through the program.

Notable deployments include jupSOL (Jupiter), bbSOL (Bybit), cdcSOL (crypto.com), dSOL (Drift), and dfdvSOL (DeFi Dev Corp). As of 2025–2026, Sanctum's platform hosts over 1,361 LSTs, making it the largest LST platform on Solana by count.

Gateway: Transaction Delivery Infrastructure

Beyond liquid staking, Sanctum extended its infrastructure stack with Gateway, a transaction delivery service for Solana developers. Gateway routes transactions across multiple channels — traditional RPCs, staked weighted quality-of-service RPCs, Jito bundles, and custom senders — with real-time control and observability available through a dashboard. Developers can configure priority fee policies centrally rather than in application code. If a transaction lands via standard RPC rather than a Jito bundle, Gateway refunds the Jito tip. The service has processed over 350,000 transactions. It builds on observability capabilities originally developed through Ironforge, Sanctum's broader Web3 DevOps platform, which handles over 300 million requests daily.

Security and Governance

Sanctum's LST programs inherit the security foundation of the Solana Labs stake pool program, which has been audited five times by Halborn, Kudelski, Ottersec, Neodyme, and Quantstamp. Infinity itself has received three additional independent audits from Neodyme, Ottersec, and Sec3. The Reserve program has been audited by Sec3.

Protocol upgrades require approval from an 11-member multisig that includes representatives from Jupiter, Jito, Sol Strategies, and Solblaze. Fee changes are capped and must be announced in advance, limiting unilateral governance risk.

Team and Background

The Sanctum team has been building on Solana since 2021 and contributed directly to the implementation of the stake pool program at Solana Labs — the same codebase that now underlies the Agave validator client. They initially launched their own stake pool under the Socean brand before pivoting to build infrastructure for the broader LST ecosystem. That foundational experience with Solana's core staking primitive informs Sanctum's architectural choices throughout the protocol.

CLOUD Governance Token

Sanctum's governance token is CLOUD, which trades on Solana and gives holders a voice in protocol governance decisions. The token has a circulating market capitalization in the range of twenty to twenty-five million dollars.

Solana Ecosystem Role

Sanctum occupies a foundational layer in Solana's staking economy. By providing shared liquidity infrastructure and a low-cost path to LST deployment, it has shifted the LST market from a competition between a handful of large protocols to an open platform where validators, exchanges, DeFi applications, and communities can each offer a branded staking product backed by deep, shared liquidity. As of late 2025, roughly 13.76% of all staked SOL was flowing through LSTs, representing approximately ten billion dollars in total value. Sanctum's infrastructure underpins the majority of that activity, making it one of the more consequential protocol-layer projects in the Solana ecosystem.