Sanctum

Sanctum isn’t a single-issuer LST like Jito or Marinade — it’s infrastructure that lets anyone launch their own LST and lets holders swap between different LSTs with low slippage, solving liquid staking’s fragmented-liquidity problem. If you hold an LST from a smaller or validator-specific issuer, Sanctum’s unified liquidity layer is often the easiest way to swap it for SOL or another LST without relying on thin, separate pools for every individual token.

What it’s for

Sanctum is used both by holders swapping between LSTs and by projects or validators who want to launch their own LST without building liquidity infrastructure from scratch.

Fees

Swap fees within Sanctum’s liquidity layer vary by LST pair and pool; check the app for current rates. Sanctum doesn’t charge a separate fee for the underlying staking rewards of whichever LST you hold — that’s set by the individual LST’s issuer.

Pros and cons

• Pro: solves a real problem — before Sanctum, smaller LSTs had thin, fragmented liquidity that made entering or exiting expensive.
• Pro: lowers the barrier for validators and projects to launch their own LST.
• Con: your risk exposure depends on which underlying LST you hold, not just the aggregation layer — a smaller, validator-specific LST carries its own validator-concentration and liquidity risk.
• Con: because it enables many small issuers, the number of available LSTs varies in quality and track record more than the largest few.

Track record

Sanctum has become significant infrastructure specifically for the long tail of Solana LSTs beyond the largest few issuers, addressing a real liquidity fragmentation problem that existed as more validators and projects launched their own staking tokens.

Risk considerations

Because Sanctum aggregates liquidity across many different LSTs, your risk exposure depends partly on which underlying LST you hold or receive — a smaller, validator-specific LST carries different validator concentration and liquidity risk than a large, established one. Read our liquid staking guide to understand what to check about any specific LST before holding it, beyond the aggregation layer itself.