Solana LST holders earn $230M in staking rewards via Sanctum

Solana stakers who chose liquid staking tokens over the traditional route have collected about $230 million in rewards through Sanctum since 2024, according to a post on X.

The roughly $230 million figure lines up closely with onchain tracking. DefiLlama records approximately $233.85 million in cumulative fees for Sanctum Validator LSTs, a tally that covers both staking rewards and related fees.

A liquid staking token, or LST, is a receipt you get when you stake SOL through a provider. Your SOL keeps earning staking rewards in the background. Meanwhile, the receipt token stays tradable and usable elsewhere, so your capital is not frozen in a vault waiting for the clock to run out.

Sanctum supports more than 200 validator-specific or branded LSTs, and that count could potentially top 1,000 once every branded token is included. All of them can be swapped through Sanctum’s Infinity pool, a shared liquidity pool built for low-slippage trading between these tokens. That design lowers the bar for launching a new LST, since a fresh token does not need to build its own trading market from scratch.

Record TVL and a brief stint at the top

By late Q3 2026, Sanctum reached a record total value locked of 18.62 million SOL, worth over $1.9 billion. That represented an 11.9% increase quarter-over-quarter and marked 12 consecutive quarters of growth.

In August 2026, Sanctum briefly overtook Jupiter to become the largest Solana protocol by TVL.

Yields have generally sat in the mid-to-high 5% APY range, with recent readings around 5.7% APY. Those returns are sometimes boosted beyond plain staking through MEV and fee-sharing arrangements. MEV, or maximal extractable value, refers to extra revenue validators can capture from how they order transactions in a block. When validators share some of that income with stakers, holders pick up a little extra on top of base rewards.

How Sanctum got here

Sanctum has positioned itself as Solana’s leading liquid staking provider since launching its infrastructure in 2024. Branded tokens such as JupSOL, tied to Jupiter, and bbSOL, tied to Bybit, have continued to grow within the Sanctum ecosystem.

Sanctum rolled out a 2-of-3 multisig security model in its consumer app, meaning transactions need approval from two of three keys rather than one. It also introduced Sanctum Wrapped SOL, or swSOL.

What this means for Solana stakers and the wider ecosystem

For validators, Sanctum’s model changes the competitive picture. A smaller operator can launch a branded token and tap shared liquidity, which could make it easier to attract delegators who might otherwise default to the biggest names.

There are risks worth watching. Concentration is one: when a single protocol becomes the main gateway for liquid staking, its security and operations matter to a large share of the ecosystem. Smart contract risk and liquidity risk never fully disappear, especially during sharp market swings.

With more than 200 LSTs today and potentially over 1,000 including branded versions, users need to understand which tokens carry deep liquidity and which do not.

Twelve straight quarters of growth, record TVL, and roughly $230 million paid out to holders put Sanctum at the center of how Solana stakers earn yield.