Sanctum: Solana's Layer of LST Liquidity

Introduction: The Solana LST Market is Cooking

Over the course of this cycle, Solana’s explosive growth and activity revealed underlying networking implementation issues. In order to increase the probability of landing transactions onchain, users spam the network, which in turn increases the number of failed and dropped transactions. A by-product of these networking inefficiencies is two-fold: 

1. There is an opportunity for native-node operators that operate highly efficient nodes to attract more stake, create LSTs, and integrate with DeFi applications. 
2. There is an incentive for application developers to run their own nodes and distribute LSTs, because using staked-weight Quality-of-Service, or directly sending transactions to Jito or the leader, increases the probability of landing transactions, and more stake increases revenue. 

Given the above incentives for native teams to run their own nodes, the number of LSTs is growing, producing additional revenue streams and business opportunities. 

Sanctum is ahead of this emergent trend, and launched Infinity–a multi-LST liquidity protocol where users can discover LSTs and hold INF to gain exposure to a weighted basket of LSTs in the pool. They can also provide liquidity in SOL or whitelisted LST stake pools, and swap between SOL<> LSTs. For accepted validators, the protocol also simplifies the staking migration process, where users can easily convert native staked SOL into LSTs. Sanctum’s one-stop shop for LSTs is well-positioned to play a key role in fostering Solana’s LST market expansion, and participating in the $CLOUD launch presents a promising opportunity.