Sanctum

Sanctum builds the plumbing behind many Solana liquid staking tokens (LSTs). A company, wallet or validator that wants its own staking token, such as Jupiter's jupSOL or Bybit's bbSOL, can launch one through Sanctum instead of writing and auditing its own stake pool. Sanctum then gives all those tokens a common place to trade, so a small token is not stuck without buyers. Its documentation puts the number of LSTs launched this way at more than 1,361.

The team has been building on Solana since 2021, according to its docs, and contributed to the stake pool program at Solana Labs before running its own stake pool under the Socean brand. It later moved from running one pool to selling LST infrastructure, packaged in 2025 as Staking-as-a-Service, and added Gateway, a transaction delivery service, and Ironforge, a developer operations platform. The homepage says partners have earned more than $5 million in revenue through it, a figure it does not date.

The company named in Sanctum's legal disclaimer is Socean Labs Inc; the disclaimer does not give its jurisdiction or address, and we found no published list of founders or executives. Sanctum's investor page says it has never sold equity to any investor. DefiLlama's funding database records a $6.1 million seed-plus round in April 2024 led by Dragonfly. Sanctum also has a token, called CLOUD in its legal documents and listed as SANC (Sanctum) on CoinGecko, with a 1 billion maximum supply and about 496 million circulating as of October 2026. The disclaimer says it is used for governance and incentives and carries no claim on Sanctum's revenue or assets.

Sanctum's products fit together as layers. Each one has its own fees and its own on-chain program.

• Sanctum LSTs: each branded token is a stake pool deployed from Solana Labs' stake pool program at version 1.0.0, the same code Jito and Blaze use. The partner chooses validators and branding; holders earn that pool's staking rewards through a rising exchange rate.
• Infinity (INF): a single pool that holds a basket of LSTs and SOL. It quotes swaps between any supported LST and SOL at each token's on-chain SOL value, so there is no slippage, only a fee. INF holders earn the weighted staking yield of the basket plus swap fees. Sanctum says INF earned an annualized 26.12% for the epoch around the 10 October 2025 market crash, when swap demand spiked.
• Router: a wrapper that lets LSTs be swapped through their underlying stake accounts when two pools share a validator. It is integrated into Jupiter, and Sanctum says it holds no funds itself.
• Reserve: a pool of SOL, over 600,000 SOL by Sanctum's count, that buys active stake accounts or LSTs for instant SOL when neither Infinity nor the Router can fill an exit. It is a last resort and not open to retail deposits.
• swSOL: a wrapped SOL that always redeems 1:1. Part of the SOL is staked, but the rewards go to the app that minted it, not to the holder.

The practical point for a holder is that an exit from a Sanctum LST is usually a swap into Infinity or a stake-account route, not a wait in an unstaking queue. Jito and Marinade run their own single large tokens instead; how Sanctum compares with other liquid staking tokens is in our ratings.

Fees are set per product, and for branded LSTs partly by the partner. The defaults below come from Sanctum's documentation as of October 2026. Infinity's swap fees vary by token and are adjusted dynamically, so Sanctum publishes no single figure; the app shows the quote before you sign.

Because every partner token can carry its own settings, the 10% default is not a guarantee for any given LST. Sanctum says management can raise fees, but changes are capped and announced in advance.

There are two layers of control. Upgrades to the Sanctum stake pool programs need a majority of an 11-member multisig whose members include Jupiter, Jito, Sol Strategies, Solblaze and Sanctum, so no one party can change the code. Day-to-day management of the LSTs, meaning setting them up, staking deposits and adjusting fees, is held by Sanctum. Sanctum states that the management authority cannot take user funds even if it is compromised. The Infinity controller program is upgraded by what the docs call the Sanctum multisig, without naming its members or threshold.

The LST program relies on audits of the Solana Labs stake pool code: Kudelski (July 2021), Quantstamp (October 2021), Neodyme (December 2022), OtterSec (January 2023) and Halborn (December 2023). Infinity was audited by Neodyme, OtterSec and Sec3, and the Reserve's unstake program by Sec3 in July 2023. Sanctum's code is open source on GitHub under igneous-labs. We found no bug bounty or insurance described in Sanctum's documentation.

The biggest variable is the partner behind each token. A branded LST is only as good as its validator choices and its fee settings, and Sanctum keeps the management key. If Infinity or the Router cannot absorb a large sale, the exit falls to the Reserve, whose fee rises toward 8% as it is drained, or to a normal epoch-length unstake.

Solana has no protocol slashing today, so a bad validator costs rewards rather than principal; that could change if Solana adds slashing. The usual smart contract and oracle risks apply to Infinity, which prices each token by reading its stake pool's on-chain state. INF holders also carry the risk of every token in the basket. We found no hack, depeg or loss event involving Sanctum's programs in its documentation or in DefiLlama's hacks database as of October 2026.

Staking runs through the Sanctum app with a Solana wallet: you pick an LST or INF, deposit SOL, and receive the token. No account is needed. Sanctum publishes the app terms of use as a downloadable document in its docs. Its token documents excluded people in the United States, Canada and China from token distributions; check the app terms for current restrictions on using the app.

To exit, you swap the LST or INF back to SOL in the app, which routes through Infinity, the Router or the Reserve and shows the fee before you confirm. You can also withdraw a stake account from the underlying pool and deactivate it yourself, which takes until the end of the Solana epoch.

Sanctum's website links to its X account, a Discord server, a developer alerts channel on Telegram, its GitHub, the learn.sanctum.so documentation, a research forum and the email [email protected]. Its investor page publishes quarterly reports for 2025 and 2026. Because many tokens are built on Sanctum under other brands, questions about a specific LST's validators or rewards may belong with the partner that runs it.

Sanctum's history is a shift from one stake pool to infrastructure for many.

• 2021: the team starts building on Solana and contributes to the Solana Labs stake pool program.
• Socean stake pool: the team's first product under its own brand.
• July 2023: Sec3 audits the Reserve's unstake program.
• April 2024: a $6.1 million seed-plus round led by Dragonfly, according to DefiLlama.
• 2025: offering packaged as Staking-as-a-Service; Gateway launched.
• October 2025: Infinity absorbs heavy swap demand during the 10 October market crash.
• 2026: quarterly reports continue through Q3 2026.