Love to see LSTs developing differently on Solana compared to Ethereum 
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Why LFG? Distribution. We’re quietly powering a large proportion of all LST-LST and LST-SOL trading volume on Solana, and played a huge role in the rise of “DeFi Summer 2.0” on Solana, but nobody knows of us. That’s fine – previously we were building the infrastructure, so we could afford to be quiet. But as we move towards the infinite-LST future, to something that requires buy-in from everyone, we need to start to get the word out.
That’s the same reason for token as well. We are not launching token to capitalise the team (we have already raised a round); we are launching token to reward early adopters, to align everyone under one big tent, to get everyone pushing for a better, more liquid Solana.
Why Jupiter’s Launchpad? We believe in the decentralised meta. Jupiter showed the world that we don’t need CEXes to launch a world-class project. In my time here I’ve seen the quality of projects on Solana grow by leaps and bounds. I think Solana will be the chain where lots of world-class projects are now grown and incubated natively, thanks to Jupiter, and we are very excited to support that meta.
On launchpad, everything is transparent; I don’t have to worry about predatory CEX deals or that they will dump our token. On Launchpad, I know that everyone joining is a true believer; they believe in Jupiter and the Solana ecosystem. We want everyone here to come in on the ground floor – instead of serving as exit liquidity for insiders – and grow Sanctum and Solana together.
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You are very kind! Thank you, and we appreciate tough questions in any case!
We raised a round in 2021 and are currently still well-capitalised as we have kept the team lean and our burn low. So we are not looking for cash. The purpose of the token is not so much to get a payday, but rather to get buy-in from everyone on Solana.
Let’s not forget the original purpose of any token: to decentralise the protocol and align incentives throughout the ecosystem. Our team has built the infrastructure for an infinite-LST future, but it’s the community that needs to push for, and embrace, this future. We need everyone’s help to get all SOL staked and move native stake to LSTs, whether as a staker, a builder, a validator, or a user. That is why we are giving out a token: because this is PvE, and we want everyone on board.
Good point. Being in this space so long, I’m always wary of committing to too rigid a roadmap. If you had asked me what our roadmap was in December 2021 I would have said “launch a token quick and try and fight the incumbents”. But in hindsight that would have been a mistake.
We have a lot more conviction now; we’re going to try and build the infinite-LST future. Over the past years we have built the infrastructure for it to happen. Now that there is unified liquidity and the barrier to entry for spinning up a new LST is so low, I think we’ll see very many new models of LSTs rise up. I myself can already think of several (subscription LSTs, NFT LSTs, lottery LSTs, …) but there are many more funding models that could be enabled with it. I can’t exactly predict which types of LSTs will take off, but we’ve made the soil as fertile as possible, so a thousand different flowers can bloom.
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Thank you for the kind words and so happy to see an OG in this space Hope to count on your support.
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Let’s Grow One thing I would like to see in pools is clearly how much i invested in the start (usd) and much rewards are at (usd). I use Meteora but is lacking a lot of report information. Also, hiden fees are very annoying. Please be very clear about it. All the best and keep growing!
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I am very bullish on LSTs and love the idea of there being thousands. This is seriously big brain stuff. Solving the issue of fragmented liquidity would be a great starter to allow for a larger amount of LSTs to thrive in the space.
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Sanctum is really exciting, the ability to help secure the SOL network whilst still having the liquid to use elsewhere. In their words, best of both worlds. Bullish.
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I like your protocol and what you propose for SLTs. Yet for LFG I think these are the most important questions:
How should our token be used to govern the Sanctum DAO and steward this public good far into the future? How should our token accrue value?
Among that, the proposal of tokenomics is something that your team should clarify beforehand. Maybe looking at what MNDE and LDO do for starters and then list what would be improved in comparison to them.
I would love to see more information about these topics.
A big fan of Sanctum. Its pushing LSTs back into decentralization. Top 3 project on LFG at the moment from my point of view.
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nice work on sanctum! can totally see how better liquidity leads to easier onboarding and offboarding of any LST
there’s probably new use cases for these LSTs that we have yet to see, but currently LSTs are mostly used in defi and if a protocol wants to for eg lend or borrow a new LST they still have to integrate each new LST one by one or a user will probably be overwhelmed if deciding which of the 1000 LSTs to borrow. any ideas/plans to make this easier? maybe an aggregator or an index token holding multiple LSTs like the mother of all LSTs?
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There is no technical (or UX) reason why there can’t be thousands of LSTs integrated. Jupiter supports thousands of tokens with no problem. We’re working closely with DeFi protocols to get all these LSTs integrated.
Yes! This is exactly what we’re trying to do with Sanctum Infinity (introduction article here).
Infinity is a multi-LST liquidity pool that allows swaps between all LSTs in the pool. Users can become liquidity providers (LPs) by depositing any (whitelisted) LST into the Infinity Pool. In return, they will receive the INF token, which accrues both staking rewards and trading fees from the pool.
infSOL is itself an SPL liquid staking token and so can be directly used by DeFi protocols. All LSTs will be able to share the liquidity of INF-USDC and INF-SOL, or route via INF to access the liquidity from any other LST pair.
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I would like to test new features of sanctum as soon as possible 
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Infinity is quite a novel and fascinating concept, had a great read when catching up on it. I think this will have a very interesting impact in the DeFi space!
Do you stake to validators or is this a LST thing mainly?
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Thanks for the kind words! Infinity just went live and you can deposit now on app.sanctum.so/infinity. Once this is fully integrated with Jupiter we should expect Infinity to do a lot of LST volume.
The power of Infinity is that it can hold ALL LSTs – this includes stake pool LSTs (like Solblaze, Marinade, Jito Zippy etc.), but also validator LSTs (bonkSOL, compassSOL, driftSOL, laineSOL, superSOL etc.). This is the ultimate liquidity solution for all LSTs, large and small 
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Just going through the material and it is a riveting read. This is amazing creativity in solving a foundational problem that will have far reaching affects on the wider SOL ecosystem… I just have a few questions that will help visualize some points.
So the project launches and tokens distributed. And 10,000 LSTs soon soak the market in liquidity. Can you paint a picture of what unlocking this liquidity will allow the market to do?
What other ramifications does unlocking the LST liquidity give to validators? How will it affect the quality and quantity of validators on the network?
Lastly, what is the purpose of the DAO? what role will it play in the development?
I cannot wait for the first 6 LSTs and see how they will differentiate between each other… this is wild.
Thank you so much,
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wow. crazy to see some of the OGs dropping intros in here. LFG!
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Bullish on Sanctum! 
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Thanks so much for the kind words! What we’re doing is really unique – something that just isn’t a thing on any other chain. So it’s quite hard for most people to understand and I’m glad that you get it!
Very excellent and thoughtful questions as well.
Absolutely.
After almost three years, LSTs are still only 5% of the potential pie. This shows to me that there is not enough reason for most people to hold LSTs at the moment. Indeed, a lot of the existing stuff are variants over the same idea (different flavours of stake pools). There’s nothing wrong with that, but if we want to unlock the rest of the 95%, we need to give people who are not DeFi native/not interested in borrow-lend, a strong reason to hold an LST.
When we make it so easy for people to spin up these LSTs (and ensure their safety), we see a LOT of exciting innovation. Here are two examples:
bonkSOL. The value proposition has become quite obvious here: hold bonkSOL, get free BONK. I like this one because we are getting a LOT of the memecoin folks – not super sophisticated, but bullish on SOL and bullish on BONK – come in. They may not know anything about staking but they love the fact that they can just hold SOL and get free stuff.
raposaSOL, something still in the works. Again, clear value prop: hold raposaSOL, get free coffee. This one excites the NFT crowd as well as anyone on Solana who drinks coffee, really.
These are exciting because they open up new demographics that would never consider staking. And these are giving very differentiated value above and beyond “earn 7.5% p.a. on your SOL, use it in DeFi”.
If bonkSOL and raposaSOL don’t appeal to you, that’s fine. There are going to be a thousand different ones and one of them WILL resonate. That is how we’re going to unlock the missing 95%. That’s the future: we give SOL holders a thousand reasons to stake their SOL.
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You will see the quality of validators go WAY up.
Why? Previously validators were struggling to differentiate themselves. They could only fight on commission and APY, which is quite a shitty situation to be in.
There are two kinds of validators: the ones who are checked out (big insti validators, just farming Solana Foundation stake delegation and validating 20+ other chains), and the ones who are all-in on Solana and constantly trying to improve.
The problem is that it was impossible to tell these two apart.
With LSTs we give a LOT more opportunities for validators to differentiate themselves. First of all any validator who sets up an LST with us is already in the 99%-ile – they care enough to set something up. But also we see a LOT of innovation: validators sharing block rewards, priority fees, airdropping tokens, gamification etc. Here are some examples:
- jucySOL: shares 50% of all block rewards and priority fees + BSKT airdrop
- laineSOL: shares 10%
- Many other LSTs share fees: compassSOL, hubSOL, picoSOL etc.
This is something I’m personally very proud of as well. We’ve been working with validators since 2021 and we are close personal friends with a few of them. A lot of them wanted to set up LSTs but couldn’t because they didn’t have millions of dollars to seed liquidity pools. Now ANYONE can do it – we’ve torn down barriers to entry.
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