Sandglass

Sandglass was the first pool-based yield trading protocol on Solana, built by the team behind Lifinity — Solana's first oracle-based DEX, which had processed over $20 billion in volume and $5 million in protocol fees before Sandglass launched. The protocol was announced in April 2024 and went live in July 2024. Its official website stated that users must redeem assets by June 30, 2026, after which all support — including the website — would end. As of that date, Sandglass is no longer operational.

Core Mechanism

Sandglass applied the yield-splitting model pioneered on Ethereum by Pendle, adapted for Solana's architecture and extended with a distinct AMM design. The protocol accepted yield-bearing tokens (YBTs) — tokens that accrue value over time through staking rewards, lending fees, or LP positions — and split each into two components:

• Principal Tokens (PT): A discounted claim on the underlying principal, redeemable at maturity for a fixed return. Suitable for users seeking predictable yield without exposure to rate fluctuations.
• Yield Tokens (YT): Pure exposure to the variable yield stream generated by the underlying asset between deposit and maturity. YT holders receive a leveraged claim on incentives, fees, or airdrop distributions without putting their principal at risk.

The fundamental accounting identity governing the protocol was: YBT = PT + YT. Users depositing a YBT received equal amounts of PT and YT. Redeeming required depositing matching amounts of PT and YT to recover the original YBT.

AMM Design

Unlike Pendle, which pairs PT against the underlying YBT in its AMM, Sandglass used a unified PT-YT pool. This design concentrated liquidity around the YBT's implied yield rather than a static price, and dynamically adjusted pricing based on realized yields to reduce impermanent loss for liquidity providers. The single-pool architecture allowed swaps between PT, YT, and YBT through one venue. During the beta period, the team seeded protocol-owned liquidity to provide highly concentrated initial depth and minimize slippage.

Supported Assets

At launch, Sandglass targeted a broad range of yield-bearing assets across Solana DeFi:

• Liquid staking tokens: mSOL, JitoSOL, bSOL
• Revenue-sharing tokens: veLFNTY (Lifinity's own governance token)
• Perpetual swap LP tokens: JLP, DLP, FLP
• Vault LP tokens from Kamino, Hawksight, and Tulip
• Yield-bearing stablecoins: USDH, YBX, SUSD

Vault Structure and Maturity

Sandglass operated through time-bound vaults. Each vault had a defined maturity date, which anchored the pricing of PT and YT. At maturity, PT became redeemable for the YBT value it represented at vault inception (delivering a fixed rate), while YT became redeemable for the accumulated yield the vault's YBT had generated over its lifetime. The time-bound structure was essential to meaningful yield pricing, as yield rates can vary significantly across different time horizons.

Expansion to Eclipse

In late 2025, Sandglass expanded to Eclipse, a high-throughput Ethereum L2 with a Solana virtual machine. The Eclipse deployment focused on tETH, a basket of Ethereum liquid restaking derivatives comprising eETH (Ether.fi), ezETH (Renzo), rswETH (RSW), and steakETH (Steakhouse Finance). At the time of a late-2025 review, Sandglass reported $4.04 million in total TVL across all chains and $132,376 specifically on Eclipse, with Eclipse transaction costs under $0.001 per swap. Fixed-yield APY on the Eclipse deployment ranged from 8-12%, with YT pool APYs of 20-40% during incentive epochs.

Security

The protocol passed Sec3's automated X-Ray security audit with zero flagged issues prior to launch, and subsequently completed a formal third-party security audit, the report for which was linked from the homepage.

Team

Sandglass was built by the Lifinity team. Lifinity launched as Solana's first oracle-based DEX in May 2021, reached top-10 DEX by volume across all chains at its peak, and raised $10 million through a novel vote-escrowed initial DEX offering (veIDO) mechanism that emphasized protocol-owned liquidity.

Shutdown

The sandglass.so website displayed a notice directing users to redeem their assets by June 30, 2026, after which all protocol support — including the website — would cease. The protocol did not publish a detailed shutdown rationale on the main site. The Sandglass Twitter account (@sandglass_so) had no recent activity as of August 2026.