Sandglass

Sandglass was a yield trading protocol on Solana, built by the team behind the Lifinity N/A$1.15+0.0% exchange. It is closed. This page is about that crypto protocol, not the hourglass or the Korean drama of the same name.

Sandglass took a token that earns yield, such as staked SOL, and split it into two parts. One part paid a fixed return. The other part carried the changing yield. You could trade each part on its own.

The team called it the first pool-based yield trading protocol on Solana. The app opened on 18 April 2024. Users were told to redeem their assets by June 30, 2026, and the website has since gone offline.

Is Sandglass still active? The shutdown and the June 30, 2026 redemption deadline

Sandglass is no longer active. In April 2026 the official Sandglass account on X told users to "redeem your Sandglass assets by June 30, 2026". It repeated the warning through June. Its last post went out the day before the deadline and read "24 hours remain. Act now or forever hold your peace."

The account has been silent since then. We checked the site in October 2026 and it would not load. The Eclipse version of the app was gone too. DefiLlama lists Sandglass as a deprecated protocol.

Sandglass gave no reason for closing in any post we could find. The timing follows the end of its parent project. Lifinity holders voted in December 2025 to close the exchange and hand its funds back to token holders, as Cryptopolitan reported. The report put the payout at about $43.4 million and blamed tougher competition on Solana.

You may still hold Sandglass principal tokens, yield tokens or LP tokens. The app you would have used to redeem them no longer loads. We could not confirm whether the on-chain program still accepts redemptions.

How Sandglass yield trading worked: principal tokens (PT) and yield tokens (YT)

Sandglass split a yield-bearing token into a principal token (PT) and a yield token (YT). A yield-bearing token is one that grows in value as it earns rewards, the way mSOL grows as its SOL earns staking rewards. PT was a claim on the original deposit. YT was a claim on the yield that deposit earned up to a set end date, called maturity.

The rule behind it was simple: one yield-bearing token always equalled one PT plus one YT. You deposited the token and got the same amount of each. You handed back equal amounts of both to get your token out again.

Each deposit went into a vault with its own maturity date. Lifinity's explainer on how Sandglass works describes what happened when a vault matured. PT became redeemable for the value the deposit had when the vault opened. YT became redeemable for its share of the yield the vault had earned over its life.

That gave you three ways to use it. Lifinity's own example uses mSOL yielding 7% in a one-year vault:

• You think the yield will fall. You swap mSOL for PT and lock in 7%, whatever happens to staking rates.
• You think the yield will rise. You swap mSOL for YT. In Lifinity's example, a rise from 7% to 8% over the year turns into a return of about 14.6%, because YT is a concentrated bet on the yield alone.
• You have no view. You deposit mSOL as a liquidity provider and earn trading fees on top of the staking yield.

The trade-off for a YT buyer ran the other way too. If the yield fell short of what the price implied, the YT buyer ended up with less than a plain holder of the token.

The Sandglass yield AMM versus Pendle's pool design

Sandglass took its core idea from Pendle on Ethereum and changed the pool. Pendle trades each principal token against the yield-bearing token. Sandglass put PT and YT in one pool. That one pool let you swap between PT, YT and the token you started with.

Lifinity gave two reasons. A trader with a view on yield is trading principal against yield, so a PT-YT pool fits the trade. One pool per vault also keeps the money in one place, so trades move the price less.

The pool priced trades around the token's yield, where a normal pool works around a price. It then shifted that centre as real yield came in. On Pendle, outside traders do that job, and the people who fund the pool bear the cost. That cost is called impermanent loss: what you lose when the pool's price lags the market. Lifinity said its own exchange worked in a similar way, by tracking an outside price feed.

Sandglass also paid yield in a different way. On Pendle, YT holders claim yield as it builds up, so the YT price falls to zero by the end date. On Sandglass the yield stayed inside the YT until the end. Lifinity said this made YT easier to use as collateral in other apps.

Which assets and vaults Sandglass supported

Sandglass ran vaults for staked SOL tokens, restaking tokens, LP tokens from perps exchanges and lending deposits. Lifinity said the app would start with one vault for mSOL, the staked SOL token from Marinade MNDE$0.025+1.9%. Deposits from outside LPs were closed at first. Lifinity filled the pool with its own funds to test it.

Posts from the Sandglass account in late 2025 show which vaults were coming to an end:

• kySOL and kyJTO, where YT holders claimed JTO rewards
• FLP.1, an LP token from a perps exchange
• cPYUSD, a PYUSD lending deposit
• cUSDC from Kamino's JLP market

The first Sandglass post in April 2024 named a much longer list. It ran from JitoSOL and bSOL to JLP, veLFNTY and stablecoins that pay yield. Lifinity called these tokens "whose yield has the potential to be traded". We have not confirmed that each one got a vault.

Sandglass on Eclipse and the tETH market

Sandglass also ran on Eclipse, a network that runs Solana's software on top of Ethereum. The market there was built around tETH, a yield-bearing ETH token on Eclipse.

The Eclipse version closed first. In November 2025 the Sandglass account told anyone who had used Sandglass on Eclipse to redeem their assets and their tETH "before the deadline". DefiLlama shows no funds left on the Eclipse side.

Who Sandglass was for

Sandglass suited three kinds of Solana user while it ran. It was a poor fit if you wanted a simple place to park funds and leave at any time.

• Stakers and lenders who wanted a known return. Buying PT fixed your yield until the end date. The cost was being stuck with a rate that might later look low.
• Traders with a view on rates, rewards or airdrop points. A small sum in YT gave you a big bet on yield. You could lose most of that sum if the yield fell short.
• Holders with no view, who were happy to fund the pool and earn swap fees.

Thin markets held all three back. A research note on Pendle-style protocols on Solana from August 2025 called Sandglass a niche platform. It said Sandglass had the least money and the least trading of its Solana rivals. In a thin market your own trade moves the price. That hurts most when you need to sell before the end date.

Sandglass is closed, so nobody can use it now. Two groups still look it up: past users who want to know what became of their tokens, and people who study how yield markets work on Solana.

Sandglass risks: audits, safety and what went wrong

The main risk with Sandglass now is that it is closed. The redemption deadline passed on June 30, 2026, the official app is offline, and no team is posting support updates. Treat any site that claims to offer Sandglass redemptions with suspicion, because closed protocols attract phishing copies.

On audits, the evidence is thin. Lifinity wrote in April 2024 that Sandglass had passed Sec3's automated X-Ray scan with no issues, and that the team was "aiming to undergo a formal audit in June". An automated scan is not a manual audit. We could not find a published report from a formal audit, and the homepage that might have linked one is gone.

We also could not check who controlled upgrades to the Sandglass program. Our records hold no program address for it, so the upgrade authority is unverified.

Sandglass was non-custodial in design: deposits sat in on-chain vaults and came back through PT and YT redemption. We found no report of an exploit or lost funds during its life. Users got almost three months of public notice before the deadline.

The product risks were the usual ones for yield trading. YT could lose most of its value if yields fell. PT locked you into a rate. Every vault also carried the risk of the token underneath it.

Sandglass alternatives for fixed yield and yield trading on Solana

Two other Solana apps split tokens into PT and YT the way Sandglass did: Exponent and RateX. The August 2025 research note compared both with Sandglass.

The note said Exponent's edge was its link with Kamino, and that much of its money was there in hope of an airdrop. It called RateX the market leader, with more complex tools for trading yield with leverage. It also said most RateX deposits sat in one asset. Pendle, the Ethereum original, was not live on Solana at that time.

The note was blunt about Sandglass. It said being first "meant nothing" without links into other DeFi apps or a token of its own. That comparison is more than a year old, so check where each app stands now on its own page.

The Lifinity team, the missing token and Sandglass's history

Sandglass never had its own token. It was the second product from Lifinity, which began work on its exchange in May 2021. Lifinity said that exchange had handled over $20 billion in trades by the time of its first Sandglass post. The research note said Sandglass passed no value to holders of Lifinity's LFNTY token.

The key dates:

• 11 April 2024: Lifinity announces Sandglass.
• 18 April 2024: the app goes live, per the Sandglass launch post.
• Late 2025: vaults reach their end dates, and Eclipse users are told to redeem.
• December 2025: Lifinity holders vote to close the exchange.
• April 2026: Sandglass tells users to redeem by June 30, 2026.
• 29 June 2026: the last post from the Sandglass account.

Sandglass set out to open a new market on Solana, and the market stayed small. DefiLlama's records put its lifetime swap volume at about $820,000.