Sanctum Crypto: What Sanctum Is and How Its Solana Liquid Staking Works

Sanctum is a protocol and company focused on making staked SOL usable while it stays staked. The team says it has built on Solana since 2021 and helped implement the Solana Labs stake pool program ¹. It first ran its own stake pool under the Socean name, then shifted to infrastructure for other teams' LSTs ¹. Co-founder FP Lee is named in press coverage ¹³.

The company describes three business lines today ¹:

• Staking-as-a-Service: partners get a custom LST and validator setup.
• Liquidity for LSTs: Infinity, the Router and the Reserve.
• Gateway: a transaction-delivery API for other Solana projects.

Sanctum says more than 1,361 LSTs have launched on its platform, including tokens for Jupiter, Bybit, Crypto.com, Drift and DeFi Dev Corp ¹. That is a company figure.

A Sanctum LST is a token that represents SOL staked through a stake pool. When you deposit SOL, the pool stakes it with validators and mints you an LST. The token's SOL value rises each epoch as staking rewards come in. Learn the basics in our liquid staking guide.

All Sanctum LSTs run on a fork of the Solana Labs stake pool program, version 1.0.0. Jito and BlazeStake use the same upstream program ⁸. The default fee model is the same for each Sanctum LST ⁸:

• 0.1% (10 bps) on withdrawals, whether you take SOL or a stake account.
• 10% of staking rewards each epoch, split equally between the LST's operator and Sanctum.

Individual LSTs can differ. Check the token's own page in the app before you deposit.

Infinity is a single liquidity pool shared by many LSTs. It solves a practical problem. A small LST rarely has deep trading markets of its own, so selling it can be costly. Infinity prices every supported LST by its intrinsic SOL value, read directly from that LST's on-chain stake pool state, rather than from a market price ². Swaps therefore have no slippage in the usual AMM sense. They do carry fees.

What you can do with Infinity ⁵:

• swap one LST for another, or for SOL;
• swap SOL for an LST;
• deposit SOL or a supported LST and receive INF;
• redeem INF for SOL or an LST.

INF is the pool's liquidity token. Its value tracks the pool's holdings. Holders earn the weighted average staking yield of the LSTs in the pool, plus swap fees ⁵. Rewards accrue about every epoch, which is roughly two days on Solana ⁵. Sanctum's docs note that INF's yield can rise above typical LST yield when swap demand spikes ⁵. Yield varies and is not guaranteed.

Two smaller programs handle routing and emergency liquidity.

Router. This program wraps stake pool actions so that they look like normal token swaps. That lets aggregators such as Jupiter route through them ⁶. A Router swap between two LSTs only works when both pools share a validator ⁶. Sanctum describes it as a thin wrapper with no value held at risk ⁶.

Reserve. The Reserve buys active stake accounts for instant SOL. You hand the stake account's authority to the Reserve and receive SOL right away. The Reserve then unstakes and collects the SOL at the end of the epoch ⁷. It is a backstop, used when neither the Router nor Infinity can fill a trade. Retail users cannot deposit into it ⁷.

Sanctum's fees depend on the product. All figures below come from Sanctum's documentation as of October 23, 2026. You also pay normal Solana network fees.

Infinity sends 90% of its fees into the pool, which benefits INF holders, and 10% to the protocol ³. The Reserve fee climbs as the Reserve drains. Instant unstaking during a rush can cost far more than on a quiet day.

Sanctum's contracts are non-custodial, but a few parties still hold power over them.

• Upgrades. The Sanctum LST program's upgrade authority sits with an 11-member multisig. Sanctum names Jupiter, Jito, Sol Strategies, Solblaze and itself among the members ⁸. Infinity and the other core programs list "Sanctum Multisig" as upgrade authority ⁹.
• Day-to-day management. Sanctum manages the LSTs and decides where deposited SOL is staked. Sanctum says this manager key cannot take user funds. It can raise fees, but changes are capped and come with advance notice ⁸.
• Pause switch. Infinity's controller can pause all pool operations during an incident. Its admin can also add or remove LSTs from the pool ².
• Audits. Sanctum links three Infinity audits (Neodyme, OtterSec, Sec3) and a Sec3 audit of the Reserve. It also points to five audits of the upstream stake pool program ⁴⁷⁸. An audit is a review at a point in time. It is not insurance.

Risks a new user may miss:

• INF holds many LSTs. If one of them failed or were mispriced, INF holders would share the loss.
• Validator performance and slashing risk pass through to every LST.
• Instant exits cost money. The free route is to unstake and wait for the epoch to end.
• Fake Sanctum sites and airdrop links are common for any token project. Only connect your wallet at sanctum.so, and never share a seed phrase.

CLOUD is Sanctum's governance token. It launched in July 2024 through Jupiter's LFG launchpad with a supply of 1 billion ¹⁴. At the time, DL News reported allocations of 10% for early-user airdrops, 30% for the community, 13% for investors and 25% for the team ¹³.

In September 2026, holders voted on proposal CLOUD-008. It proposed burning the roughly 259 million tokens left in the Community Reserve and renaming the ticker to SANC ¹⁴. The vote ran on MetaDAO and passed on September 19, 2026. This would cut supply to about 741 million ¹⁵. Sanctum's legal disclaimer says acquiring CLOUD is for taking part in Sanctum, not an investment offer ¹².

People often compare Sanctum with other liquid staking projects. They are built differently:

• Jito issues one main LST, JitoSOL, built on the same upstream stake pool program ⁸. Sanctum's model is many branded LSTs, plus the Infinity pool that connects them.
• Lido is mostly known for Ethereum staking (stETH). Sanctum works only on Solana.

For a scored comparison, see CoinPulse's liquid staking ratings.