Sanctum: how Solana's liquid staking platform actually works

Liquid staking tokens (LSTs) used to be a marketing-led product on Solana — Marinade owned mSOL, Jito owned JitoSOL, BlazeStake owned bSOL, and each ran its own DEX liquidity, its own redemption flow, its own staking infrastructure. Building a new LST meant bootstrapping all three from scratch, which kept the count of credible LSTs in single digits.

Sanctum unbundled that. It runs the infrastructure (validator delegation, rewards, redemption queues) and the liquidity (a unified pool that prices every LST against its fair SOL value) as separate products. Anyone can launch an LST in minutes. Traders can swap between any two LSTs at fair value.

The result: 50+ LSTs on Solana, all sharing one liquidity backbone. Here's how that backbone works.

The reserve pool

Sanctum's original product. A pool of SOL that every Sanctum- powered LST can tap for instant unstaking. Without it, unstaking an LST means waiting for the next epoch (~2 days) to reclaim SOL from the underlying stake account.

Mechanics: LST holders who want to unstake immediately swap their LST into SOL from the reserve pool, paying a small fee. The reserve pool eventually claims back the SOL on epoch boundary. The fee compensates the pool for the locked-up capital between swap and reclaim.

This is the "liquid" part of liquid staking, generalised across every Sanctum-powered LST. mSOL, JitoSOL, bSOL all use the same reserve, instead of each running their own.

Infinity (INF)

Sanctum's second product, and the one that made LST proliferation feasible. Infinity is a single AMM pool that holds every Sanctum-supported LST and prices them against each other at fair value (each LST's current SOL exchange rate, accounting for accrued staking rewards).

The trader UX:

• Swap 1 JitoSOL for ~1.X mSOL where X reflects the relative backing of each LST in actual SOL terms.
• No two-hop SOL leg. No slippage from thin LST/SOL pairs.
• The router solves the price at fair value plus a tiny pool fee.

The LP UX:

• Deposit any supported LST. You get INF (the pool's LP token) back.
• INF accrues staking yield from the LSTs underneath, plus the AMM fee revenue from people swapping between them.
• INF itself is a tradeable LST — you can swap INF back into any underlying LST (or SOL via the reserve) at any time.

Why this is more than "another AMM pool"

Conventional AMMs (Orca, Raydium) price assets by trades. A thin LST/SOL pair would have huge slippage, deterring serious volume, which keeps liquidity thin — a death spiral for new LSTs.

Infinity prices by fair value, not bid/ask. The pool knows each LST's current SOL exchange rate (the staking program publishes it), and trades at that rate plus a small fee. This means a brand-new LST with zero liquidity history can be listed in Infinity and traded at fair value from day one.

That's the unlock: an LST issuer doesn't need to bootstrap liquidity, hold tokens, run buy-walls, or beg DEXes for listings. They just plug into Sanctum and they have instant liquidity comparable to JitoSOL.

The Sanctum-issued LSTs

Anyone can launch an LST through Sanctum's issuance pipeline. Existing examples cover:

• Validator-branded LSTs — a specific validator runs an LST so their delegators stake to them. dSOL, vSOL, jucySOL, etc.
• Project-branded LSTs — a Solana app launches its own LST for treasury/utility purposes.
• Meme LSTs — yes, this is a thing. Branded LSTs where the "product" is mostly identity and merch on top of identical staking economics.
• Specialty LSTs — JupSOL (Jupiter-aligned), LainSOL (low-fee), etc. Each picks a validator set or fee structure that matches its niche.

The legacy LSTs — mSOL (Marinade), JitoSOL, bSOL — exist outside Sanctum's issuance pipeline but are integrated into Infinity and the reserve pool. They're first-class citizens, just not Sanctum-issued.

The implications for builders

Three concrete things to know:

1. Don't build LST liquidity from scratch. If you're shipping an app that needs LST swap functionality, route through Jupiter, which routes through Infinity. You get fair-value pricing for free.
2. An LST is a credible product surface. Launching one through Sanctum is a few hours of work and gives you a tokenised treasury position that yields ~5-7% with full liquidity. Many Solana apps now have their own LST as part of treasury strategy.
3. INF itself is the cleanest "just yield" SOL exposure. Holding INF gets you a basket-yield product without picking a specific validator or LST. Good default treasury position for SOL.

References

• sanctum.so
• docs.sanctum.so
• Sanctum — Infinity pool explained

Sanctum's effect on the LST market mirrors what Uniswap did for ERC-20s: the marginal cost of launching the asset went to zero, so the count exploded. The right read on Sanctum isn't "a staking project" — it's the AMM that made Solana's LST landscape interesting.