Solblaze

SolBlaze is a Solana-native builder that develops liquid staking infrastructure, developer tooling, and ecosystem utilities. Founded in December 2021, the project's flagship product is BlazeStake — a fully non-custodial liquid staking pool that issues bSOL tokens to stakers and deliberately spreads delegated stake across hundreds of validators to strengthen the security and decentralization of the Solana network.

BlazeStake: Liquid Staking on Solana's Official Contracts

BlazeStake is built on the SPL Stake Pool smart contracts developed by Solana Labs, rather than on independently written alternatives. Using the standard contracts means the underlying code has gone through significantly more scrutiny than bespoke implementations. The protocol has additionally been reviewed in eight separate audit reports from firms including Quantstamp, Kudelski, and Neodyme. DeFi Sentinel rates BlazeStake AA (Very Low Risk) with an 80/100 safety score, noting zero high-severity alerts as of September 2026.

When a user deposits SOL into BlazeStake, they receive bSOL — a liquid staking token (LST) whose exchange rate against SOL increases over time as staking rewards compound each epoch. bSOL is freely transferable and can be used across DeFi applications on Solana: as collateral for lending, in liquidity pools, or held passively while accruing rewards. Users who need immediate access to their SOL can pay a fee to use the instant unstake path, which draws from pool reserves, or they can take the delayed route — converting bSOL back to a standard staking account at the end of an epoch for a lower fee.

Validator Delegation Strategy

The most distinctive feature of BlazeStake is its validator delegation policy. The protocol targets a stake distribution across 200 or more validators, which documentation describes as the largest validator set among Solana liquid staking pools. This is a deliberate response to a structural risk on Solana: roughly 33% of all staked SOL is concentrated among just 32 validators out of more than 1,800 active ones. BlazeStake excludes this "security group" from receiving pool delegations, instead routing stake toward both high-performing validators and smaller, under-resourced ones.

Validator selection is scored using a coefficient-based formula. Top validators by APY and those ranked highly by validators.app or Stakewiz earn positive score additions, while smaller validators outside the security group qualify for tier-based bonuses based on skip rate, voting success rate, and commission level. Validators holding more than 50,000 SOL of delegated stake must run at 0% validator commission and 0% MEV commission to remain eligible.

BLZE Governance Token and Gauges

BLZE is SolBlaze's governance and utility token, distributed periodically as an airdrop to ecosystem participants. Airdrop size is proportional to a user's SolBlaze Score, which accrues based on how much bSOL a user holds and how actively they deploy it. Holding bSOL earns one point per token; lending bSOL earns 1.5 points; providing liquidity earns two points. Referrals add 10% of a referred user's score to the referrer's total.

BLZE holders can direct a portion of BlazeStake's delegated stake through a gauge voting mechanism. Gauge voters collectively control a meaningful slice of the pool's total delegations, enabling token holders to route capital toward validators they support — such as geographically underrepresented operators or community-aligned infrastructure. The upgrade authority for the BlazeStake program is managed by an ecosystem multisig that includes Solana Foundation participants, maintaining an additional check on protocol governance.

The BlazeStake DAO gives stakers and BLZE holders a say in two primary areas: bonus stake coefficients for validators and allocation of treasury funds. The treasury is funded from a portion of stake pool fees and directed toward supporting smaller projects within the Solana ecosystem through community-approved proposals.

BlazeRewards

BlazeRewards is SolBlaze's global rewards program for SOL liquid stakers, described by the project as the first of its kind on Solana. The program aggregates participation across BlazeStake and qualifying DeFi integrations, calculating scores and distributing BLZE on a rolling basis. It is designed to reward users who keep bSOL actively deployed rather than dormant in wallets.

Bliq: Custom LST Creator

Bliq (bliq.so) is SolBlaze's permissionless LST creation tool. It allows any project or community to launch a custom liquid staking token built on top of BlazeStake's infrastructure, define its own validator delegation preferences, and access discovery and holdings-tracking functionality. In 2025, IslandDAO used Bliq to launch islSOL — a community LST subsequently integrated into Kamino Finance. SolBlaze's position as the infrastructure layer enables it to offer DeFi onboarding support to Bliq issuers looking to scale their token's reach.

SOL Pay

SOL Pay is a JavaScript SDK for non-custodial Solana payments, designed for developers who want to accept SOL-based transactions without routing funds through an intermediary. The SDK is documented at solpay-docs.solblaze.org and is designed for integration in under five minutes. It supports streaming payments through a dedicated Streams feature alongside standard point-of-sale transactions.

Other Ecosystem Tools

SolBlaze operates several smaller utilities alongside its core staking products. A token minter at mint.solblaze.org lets users create SPL tokens with Metaplex metadata. An RPC status page at status.solblaze.org monitors uptime across major Solana RPC providers including Triton One, GenesysGo, QuickNode, Ankr, and Blockdaemon.

TVL and Market Position

BlazeStake's TVL peaked at approximately $315 million in early 2024, when it ranked as the third-largest liquid staking protocol on Solana. As of September 2026, TVL stands near $89 million, reflecting broader market movements that have similarly affected competing LST protocols. The protocol generates roughly $4.3 million in annualized revenue at current TVL levels, and bSOL remains supported across major Solana DeFi applications.

Ecosystem Fit

SolBlaze sits at the intersection of Solana's liquid staking and DeFi infrastructure layers. Its emphasis on validator diversity gives it a distinct positioning relative to larger LST providers, and the BLZE gauge mechanism extends that focus into community-driven delegation governance. The combination of BlazeStake, BlazeRewards, Bliq, and SOL Pay reflects a strategy of building multiple composable primitives around a single staking core, with the Solana Foundation's support of the underlying SPL contracts providing a credible security foundation for the whole stack.