Solblaze

SolBlaze is a Solana team best known for BlazeStake, a liquid staking pool. You put in SOL and get back bSOL, a token that grows in value as staking rewards pile up. BlazeStake spreads your stake over about 200 validators. It skips the biggest ones, so no small group gets too much power. SolBlaze also runs Bliq, a tool for making your own staking token, and a few tools for builders.

Watch the name. BlazeStake's bSOL is a token on Solana. BSOL, the Bitwise Solana Staking ETF, is a fund sold on US stock markets. Our coverage of the Bitwise fund is about the ETF, not this project.

How BlazeStake liquid staking works

BlazeStake is a stake pool. Many people's SOL goes into one pot, which is staked with lots of validators. When you stake, you get bSOL for your share. The number of bSOL you hold stays the same. Each bSOL is simply backed by more SOL every epoch, a period of about two days, as rewards come in.

BlazeStake does not use its own code. It runs on the SPL Stake Pool program, the shared stake pool contract built under Solana Labs. The BlazeStake addresses page lists the key accounts:

bSOL is a normal Solana token. You can hold it, lend it, or add it to a liquidity pool, and it keeps earning staking rewards. You can also deposit a stake account you already have; the BlazeStake app points to SolanaHub for that. Live yield, pool size and the validator list for this pool are on our BlazeStake stake pool page.

bSOL fees and how to unstake bSOL

BlazeStake charges no deposit fee and takes no cut of staking rewards. The only pool fee is 0.1% when you withdraw, according to the BlazeStake fees page. The app describes that as less than one week of rewards.

You have two ways out:

• Delayed unstake turns your bSOL back into a stake account. You then wait for the stake to cool down, usually about one epoch, before you can withdraw plain SOL.
• Instant unstake pays you SOL from the pool's reserve straight away. The BlazeStake app warns that instant unstaking "may not always be possible". When it isn't, you can swap bSOL for SOL on Jupiter JUP$0.261+4.6%, at whatever price and fee the market offers.

So the fee is small, but instant exits depend on the reserve and on market liquidity. If you need a large amount of SOL back fast, check both before you rely on them.

Fee revenue is split 50% to the SolBlaze DAO and 50% to the SolBlaze team, per the same fees page. A referral program also shares part of deposit fees with people who refer new stakers.

BlazeStake validators and delegation strategy

BlazeStake's big idea is to spread stake wide. The BlazeStake docs say the pool uses more validators than any other Solana stake pool. The docs say 200+. The live app listed 189 in October 2026, so think of it as about 200.

The pool skips what it calls the security group. These are the 32 or so biggest validators, which hold over a third of all staked SOL between them. They have plenty of stake already, so BlazeStake sends new stake to others.

The delegation strategy page shows how the rest are scored:

• Validators with the highest staking returns, ranked on stakeview.app, get the largest boosts.
• Validators ranked well on validators.app or Stakewiz get a smaller boost.
• Smaller validators earn tier bonuses if they keep skip rates low, vote reliably and charge low commission.

There are hard limits too. Every validator must charge under 10% commission and must not miss too many blocks or votes. Big validators face a stricter rule. Any validator with more than 50,000 SOL staked must charge nothing at all, on both rewards and MEV tips.

SolBlaze Verified Validators program

By August 2026, SolBlaze was taking applications for a Verified Validators program. In SolBlaze's words, shared by applicants on X, the program "rewards validators uniquely contributing to the Solana ecosystem with additional stake". The docs do not yet say who qualifies or how much stake it gives. If you run a validator, ask SolBlaze for the terms first.

SolBlaze also helps test network upgrades. Alpenglow, a major change to how Solana agrees on blocks, went live on 21 October 2026. That day, SolBlaze said on X it had spent six months helping test it.

BLZE token, gauges and BlazeRewards

BLZE is SolBlaze's governance and rewards token. It does two jobs: it is paid out as rewards to bSOL users, and it lets holders steer part of BlazeStake's stake.

BLZE gauges: voting on where stake goes

BLZE holders can lock their tokens in Realms, Solana's DAO voting app, for up to five years. Locking gives them gauge votes: a say over which validators get a slice of the pool's stake. Longer locks give more votes per token. Votes are counted each week, and the pool's rebalancer moves stake to match.

A February 2024 Pine Analytics review put the split at 80% for the scoring strategy, 10% for gauges and 10% for Custom Liquid Staking. BlazeStake's own docs list gauges as a delegation source but do not state the current share. Validators must charge under 10% commission to receive gauge stake.

BlazeRewards and the SolBlaze Score

BlazeRewards is SolBlaze's rewards program for bSOL holders. It gives you a SolBlaze Score based on how much bSOL you hold and whether you use it in supported DeFi apps such as lending or liquidity pools. BLZE is then shared out by score.

In October 2026 the BlazeStake app showed 0.00% of estimated APY coming from BLZE. If you are choosing bSOL for BLZE rewards, check the app first: the BLZE component may be zero.

BlazeStake DAO and treasury

The BlazeStake DAO page gives the DAO two jobs: setting bonus stake scores for validators and deciding how to spend the treasury. The treasury is funded by the DAO's half of pool fees and is meant to back smaller Solana projects. The DAO page still says the DAO "will be launched in Q3 2023", and does not report on proposals since.

Bliq: create your own Solana LST

Bliq is SolBlaze's tool for launching a custom liquid staking token (LST) on BlazeStake's infrastructure. A project or community picks which validators its token stakes with, sets its own commission, and gets a page on Bliq's LST discovery list.

The listing on Bliq included more than 25 LSTs in October 2026. Most are small. One example is islSOL from IslandDAO ISLAND$0.00048+5.3%, listed with a 1% commission. bSOL itself appears on Bliq with 0% commission.

Bliq builds on an older feature, Custom Liquid Staking. With it, you stake into BlazeStake and point your share of stake at the validators you choose. The stake follows the bSOL you control, including bSOL in supported DeFi apps. If your balance falls, that validator's stake falls with it.

Bliq suits a validator, DAO or community that wants a branded LST without writing and auditing its own stake pool. The trade-off is that your token's reach depends on getting DEX liquidity and DeFi listings, and small LSTs often have little of either.

SolBlaze SOL Pay SDK and other tools

SolBlaze also makes a few small tools. You can find them all on solblaze.org. Here is what each one does:

• SOL Pay is a JavaScript SDK for taking Solana payments without a middleman holding the funds. The SOL Pay docs cover one-off payments and a Streams feature for streaming payments.
• The token minter at mint.solblaze.org creates SPL tokens with Metaplex metadata. Solana Compass runs a token creation tool of its own, so we are a competitor here.
• The status page at status.solblaze.org tracks uptime for RPC providers including Triton One, QuickNode, Ankr and Blockdaemon.

Each tool does one small job. Most people come to SolBlaze for BlazeStake.

Who should use BlazeStake and bSOL

BlazeStake suits SOL holders who want a liquid staking token and care where their stake goes. If you want your SOL to back smaller, well-run validators instead of the largest ones, bSOL is built for that, and it takes no cut of your rewards.

It is less suited to two groups. If you need to move large amounts of SOL in and out quickly, bSOL has thinner DEX liquidity than the biggest LSTs, so swaps can cost more. And if you want extra yield from MEV tips, BlazeStake does not run a dedicated MEV layer the way Jito does.

Validator operators are a third audience. The delegation rules, BLZE gauges and the Verified Validators program are all routes to winning stake from the pool. Communities that want their own LST can use Bliq.

Is BlazeStake safe? Audits, upgrade authority and risks

BlazeStake's best safety point is its code. It uses the shared SPL Stake Pool program, which many teams have checked, instead of its own. The BlazeStake audits page lists eight audits of that program, from July 2021 to November 2023. Neodyme did four. Halborn, OtterSec, Quantstamp and Kudelski did one each. Each audit checks one version of the shared program. None of them checks SolBlaze's own app, rebalancer or rewards.

You keep control of your funds. The security overview says not even the pool operator can take SOL that belongs to you. It also says the power to upgrade the program sits with "a robust ecosystem multisig that is overseen by the Solana Foundation". We could not check this on-chain for this update, so it rests on SolBlaze's docs.

What can still go wrong:

• The pool manager key (b1azeTfpBiKN6AhEGVd1iPBsX3vmZqnFmS7Kqau7a2w) controls pool settings such as fees and the validator list. It cannot take deposits, but a bad change would still hurt stakers.
• Spreading stake across about 200 validators lowers the hit from any one validator going offline. But BlazeStake still depends on its scoring and rebalancing working as intended.
• Instant unstake can be unavailable, and bSOL can trade below its SOL value on DEXs when liquidity is thin.
• The docs are partly out of date. The security page says seven audits by five firms, while the audits page lists eight, and the DAO page still describes a 2023 launch.

We found no reported exploit of BlazeStake in our research.

bSOL vs JitoSOL, mSOL and other Solana LSTs

Pick bSOL if you want your stake spread wide and no fee taken from rewards. Pick a bigger LST if you care most about easy trading and wide DeFi use. You can see live yield and size for each pool on our stake pool comparison.

• Jito JTO$0.365+3.8% issues JitoSOL, one of the largest Solana LSTs, which adds MEV tip income. Its deeper liquidity makes big swaps cheaper.
• Marinade MNDE$0.024+0.5% issues mSOL, one of the oldest Solana LSTs.
• Jupiter issues JupSOL, and Sanctum CLOUD$0.044+0.6% runs the Infinity pool (INF) and tooling that lets many smaller LSTs trade against each other.
• Native staking with a single validator avoids smart contract risk but gives you no liquid token.

Solana Compass runs its own validator and its own staking token, so we compete with BlazeStake. To stake with one validator, you can compare validators by commission and uptime. Or see how staking with Solana Compass works.

SolBlaze history

SolBlaze started with BlazeStake. In an early Reddit post, the team pitched the pool on its open code, built with Solana Labs. Since then SolBlaze has added rewards, custom staking tokens and tools for builders. On X, SolBlaze says it builds "a collection of protocols that empower anyone to easily launch and rapidly grow their own LSTs". We found no named team members in the sources we read.