Solana Liquid Staking: How LSTs Work, Liquid vs Native Staking, and the Major Tokens Compared

Solana liquid staking is a way to stake your SOL and still be able to use it. You deposit SOL into a stake pool, and the pool gives you a liquid staking token (LST) such as JitoSOL or mSOL in return. The pool stakes your SOL with validators.

Your rewards don't arrive as extra tokens, and this catches most people out. The number of tokens you hold stays the same, while each token becomes worth more SOL. The value rises every epoch, which lasts about a day. When you withdraw, the same tokens swap back for more SOL than you put in.

You can hold the token, trade it, or lend it out, and you can swap back to SOL in seconds. Native staking pays similar rewards with no pool fee, but your SOL sits in a stake account and takes an epoch to unlock.

What Is Liquid Staking? LSTs Explained

Liquid staking is staking through a pool that hands you a tradable receipt token. That receipt is the liquid staking token, or LST. On Solana it is an ordinary token that you hold in your own wallet.

The LST is a claim on a share of the pool. As the pool earns rewards, each token is backed by more SOL.

That design is what makes the token useful elsewhere. A lending market or exchange only needs to know the LST's price in SOL. It doesn't need to understand stake accounts, cooldowns or validators.

How Liquid Staking Tokens Work on Solana

An LST works in four steps: you deposit SOL, the pool mints you tokens, the pool stakes the SOL with validators, and rewards raise the token's SOL value each epoch. Most pools run on the SPL stake pool program, or a fork of it. The pool's manager earns fees and its staker chooses validators, but neither can move your SOL out of the pool's stake accounts.

Here is a worked example. Say you swap 100 SOL into an LST that earns about 5% a year after fees. You get fewer than 100 tokens, because each one is already worth more than one SOL.

A year later you still hold the same number of tokens. Swap them back and you get about 105 SOL.

The exchange rate is plain arithmetic: the SOL the pool holds, divided by the tokens in circulation. On 30 October 2026, our stake pool data put each JitoSOL at about 1.31 SOL, after four years of compounding.

Liquid Staking vs Native Staking on Solana: Yield, Exit Time and Risk

Native staking suits you if you want the simplest setup, with no extra code between you and your validator. Liquid staking suits you if you want to use your stake in DeFi or get out fast. The rewards are close before fees, since both come from the same place.

Native staking has one thing liquid staking lacks: you pick the exact validator. If you want to back a small operator, picking a validator yourself and staking natively is the direct route. To see how the rewards are made, read where staking rewards come from.

Solana LST Fees: What a Pool Charges on Top of Validator Commission

A liquid staking pool charges its own fees on top of any commission its validators take. With native staking you pay only the validator's commission, and that can be nothing. About a third of Solana validators charged 0% on staking rewards on 10 November 2026, according to on-chain vote account data.

Pools can charge in three ways, under the stake pool fee rules. Solana Compass's stake pool data for the same day shows how common each one is.

• A rewards fee takes a share of everything the pool earns. About half the SOL in liquid staking pools pays 5% or more of its rewards this way.
• A withdrawal fee applies when you redeem through the pool. About nine in ten pools holding over 1,000 SOL charge one, usually 0.1%, and nearly all Sanctum-run pools do.
• A deposit fee applies on the way in. About one pool in nine charges it.

A change to the rewards fee or withdrawal fee only takes effect after two epoch boundaries, which gives holders time to leave.

Take 100 SOL earning about 5 SOL a year. A pool taking 5% of rewards keeps about 0.25 SOL of that, before any validator commission or exit fee.

That is why LSTs suit people who plan to use them in DeFi. Lending an LST or adding it to a liquidity pool can earn extra yield on top, which can more than cover the fees. If you only want staking rewards, native staking with a low-commission validator avoids the pool's fees altogether.

The Major Solana LSTs Compared: JitoSOL, mSOL, JupSOL, BNSOL and INF

The biggest Solana LSTs differ mainly in how they choose validators and where you can use them, not in raw yield. Their yields usually sit within a percentage point of each other. The table uses our stake pool data from 30 October 2026, and yield means the annualised growth in each token's SOL value over the last 10 epochs, after fees.

JitoSOL from Jito JTO$0.267-3.4% spreads stake across the widest set of validators in the table. It is accepted almost everywhere in Solana DeFi, which makes it the default collateral token. Jito's glossary sets its management fee at 4% of rewards. It suits you if you want the most liquid, most integrated LST and don't mind an average yield.

mSOL from Marinade MNDE$0.020-1.4% is the oldest of the large Solana LSTs. Marinade's fee page says stakers pay no rewards fee. Validators bid for its stake in an auction instead. Its pool is smaller than Jito's, so it has less liquidity on exchanges.

JupSOL is the LST of Jupiter JUP$0.263+2.8%, the exchange aggregator, and it is built with Sanctum CLOUD$0.062-2.7%. About 87% of its stake sits on Jupiter's own validator. It suits Jupiter users who want staking yield inside the same app, with more concentration than JitoSOL.

BNSOL is Binance's LST and the largest Solana pool by SOL, but size is all it leads on. We wouldn't choose it. Its on-chain rewards fee is the highest of the four at 10%, and its yield is the lowest in the table. About 80% of its stake sits on Binance's own validator, which is already one of the largest on Solana.

INF is a different kind of token. Sanctum describes Infinity as a shared pool of many LSTs. INF earns the blended staking yield of that basket plus fees from swaps between LSTs. When swap demand surges, INF can beat plain staking, as it did during the 10 October 2025 crash, when Sanctum's figures showed INF's yield spiking to about 26%. In quiet periods it tracks the basket.

For every pool we track, including fees, validator lists and yield history, see the full stake pool comparison.

What Sanctum Does for Small Solana LSTs

Sanctum builds the tools that let small Solana LSTs work. A token from a small pool has little trading on exchanges, so selling it on the open market could get you a poor price. Sanctum lets you enter and exit at the token's SOL value instead, for a small fee.

The Sanctum Router handles the steps behind a swap. It stakes SOL into a pool and withdraws it again. It can also swap one LST for another by moving the stake underneath, when the two pools share a validator. The Router is built into Jupiter, so a swap there can use it with nothing extra to do.

Sanctum's Infinity pool prices each LST at its SOL value, read on-chain. Sanctum describes these as no-slippage swaps: you pay a fee, and the size of your trade doesn't move the price.

Most small pools depend on Sanctum. About four in five pools holding under 100,000 SOL run on Sanctum's stake pool programs, on Solana Compass's data for 10 November 2026.

There are limits. The Router only works with active stake. Sanctum's Reserve, the backstop that pays instant SOL, charges 0.08% to 8% depending on how much SOL it has left, so a rush for the exit can cost more. Our profile of Sanctum covers its products and fees in more detail.

How Much SOL Is Liquid Staked?

Liquid staking pools hold a small share of staked SOL. Solana Compass's stake data puts the LST share of all stake at 12.8% in the latest epoch. The rest is staked the native way, by exchanges, funds and holders.

The share grew for two years, to a peak of about 16% in January 2026, then eased back. One reason it stays modest is that native staking on Solana is easy. Every major wallet can do it in a few taps. For more of the numbers, our staking statistics dashboard tracks stake, yield and validators by epoch.

What You Can Do With an LST: Benefits and DeFi Uses

The main benefit of an LST is that your stake keeps earning while you use it. On Solana that usually means one of four things.

• Lend it out or borrow against it on a lending market, while it keeps earning staking yield.
• Add it to a liquidity pool, such as an LST/SOL pair, to earn trading fees on top.
• Exit in seconds by swapping it for SOL on an exchange, instead of waiting for an epoch to end.
• Hold it in a wallet as the simplest compounding position, with no stake accounts to manage.

Each extra layer adds its own risk. A loan backed by an LST can be liquidated if the LST's price slips against SOL. A liquidity position can lose value if prices move. Stacking yields is how people earn more, and it is also how they lose more.

Risks of Liquid Staking on Solana

Liquid staking adds risks that native staking doesn't have, though the large pools have handled them well so far. Here are the main ones.

Smart contract risk comes first. Your SOL sits in a program, and a bug could put it at risk. The SPL stake pool program has a long list of public audits, and forks inherit that code. An audit lowers the risk but doesn't remove it. Sanctum's pools, for example, can only be upgraded by an 11-member multisig, Sanctum says.

Price risk is the one people notice. An LST's market price can drift below the SOL it can be redeemed for, usually when many holders sell at once. If you swap out in that moment, you take the loss. If you redeem through the pool instead, you get full value but wait for the epoch to end.

Validator risk still applies. An offline or badly run validator earns nothing for the time it is down, which drags on the pool's yield. Pools that use one validator, or a handful, carry more of this risk than pools spread across hundreds.

Concentration is a network-level concern. A pool that grows very large controls a lot of stake. Pools that spread stake widely help keep Solana decentralised.

How to Choose the Best LST on Solana

Choose an LST by what you plan to do with it, then compare yield last. The gaps in yield are small. The gaps in liquidity, validator spread and track record are much larger. Every pool's fees, validators and yield are on one page in our stake pools list.

Start with use. If you want to lend or borrow against your LST, pick a token that every major lending market accepts, which usually means one of the largest. If you only plan to hold, a higher-yield pool can make sense.

Then look at the validators. A pool spread across many validators carries less validator risk. A single-validator pool lets you back an operator you trust, with the risk tied to that one operator.

Check the fees and the exit route. Look at the rewards fee and any withdrawal fee, and check that the token trades on Jupiter with enough depth for your size. Finally, look at the track record: how long the pool has run, and which audits cover its code.

How to Get an LST and How to Redeem It

Getting an LST takes one swap. In most wallets you can swap SOL for any major LST through Jupiter, or deposit directly on the issuer's site. You need a Solana wallet with some SOL, plus a little extra for fees.

To get out, you have two routes. Swapping back to SOL is instant, at the market price. Redeeming through the pool returns the full value, but as a stake account that unlocks at the end of the epoch. If you need SOL now without taking a poor price, read how to skip the unstaking wait.

If you'd rather stake natively from a wallet, our walkthrough on staking from Phantom, Solflare or a Ledger covers each step. To see what a given amount might earn either way, estimate your rewards with our calculator, or head back to our hub for every option in one place.