What is Sanctum? DeFi Protocol Guide

Sanctum is an infrastructure protocol deployed on the Solana blockchain focused on liquid staking. The project builds the essential systems that underlie Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs), supports validator operations, and delivers services for end users, developers, and institutional partners inside the Solana ecosystem.

Overview

Sanctum aims to supply the foundational infrastructure for liquid staking on Solana, addressing the needs of retail users, validators, and institutions. Its roots go back to a Solana stake pool named "Socean," created by the same team, which has been active in the Solana ecosystem since 2021 and contributed to the original stake pool program at Solana Labs (now Agave).

The project later moved away from running a single consumer-facing stake pool toward building broad-based infrastructure that could support many LSTs rather than one isolated product.

This repositioning resulted in the formation of Sanctum as it is known today. At the heart of the protocol is the Infinity pool, a collective liquidity mechanism intended to consolidate LST liquidity across the network and materially reduce the hurdle for launching new liquid staking solutions.

In addition to its LST infrastructure, Sanctum provides business-facing services, including a "Staking-as-a-Service" product that enables partners to deploy branded LSTs, along with transaction delivery and Web3 development operations platforms.

In Q4 2025, Sanctum published a quarterly report outlining its expansion and stated that it was the leading liquid staking protocol on Solana during that quarter.

History

The team behind Sanctum began contributing to Solana in 2021, initially developing a stake pool called Socean and participating in the creation of the stake pool program under Solana Labs.

Seeing a wider requirement for infrastructure rather than another standalone pool, the team shifted strategy from the direct-to-consumer Socean model to focus on building the underlying technology to support multiple liquid staking tokens, marking the start of the Sanctum protocol.

By 2025, Sanctum formalized its business-to-business approach with the official launch of its "Staking-as-a-Service" offering, enabling projects and institutions to issue their own branded LSTs on top of Sanctum's infrastructure. Later in the year, the Q4 2025 "Sanctum Quarterly" report emphasized notable growth statistics and stated that Sanctum had become the top liquid staking protocol on Solana.

Products and Services

Sanctum's product stack is organized to serve infrastructure needs, end-user applications, and tools for enterprises and developers.

Core Infrastructure: The Infinity Pool

The protocol's primary offering is Infinity, a pooled liquidity construct that brings together all LSTs on Solana. Its key innovation is lowering the marginal cost of launching a new LST to near-zero, which decreases the barrier for validators, DAOs, and projects to introduce liquid staking tokens without having to establish deep, standalone liquidity.

By unifying liquidity, Infinity aims to reduce fragmentation across the ecosystem.

The deployment of the Infinity pool is associated with rapid expansion in the Solana LST market. Prior to Infinity, only a handful of LSTs existed on the network; the infrastructure enabled growth to over 1,361 distinct LSTs, creating a more varied and competitive liquid staking landscape.

Token ($CLOUD)

Sanctum's native token, CLOUD, functions as a governance token on Solana, intended to align the incentives of contributors, stakers, and builders through decentralized decision-making. The token contract address is `CLoUDKc4Ane7HeQcPpE3YHnznRxhMimJ4MyaUqyHFzAu`.

Utility and Governance

The principal purpose of CLOUD is governance. Holders can influence the protocol's trajectory. Sanctum uses a governance approach called "Funtarchy," under which participants express conviction about proposals by buying or selling CLOUD, effectively voting with market actions. This mechanism is designed to reward accurate forecasts and tie token ownership to the project's long-term objectives. In addition to governance rights, CLOUD holders receive access to private community channels and events within the "Cloudfam."

Tokenomics and Market Data

Partnerships

Sanctum maintains partnerships across the Solana ecosystem, spanning technical collaboration and commercial relationships tied to its Staking-as-a-Service offering.

Institutional and Foundational Relationships

The Sanctum team has historical connections to Solana's core development efforts. Team members were early contributors to the stake pool program originally developed at Solana Labs (now Agave), providing them with detailed knowledge of Solana's staking systems.

Staking-as-a-Service and LST Partners

A number of notable projects and exchanges leverage Sanctum's infrastructure to run their own branded Liquid Staking Tokens, demonstrating the use case for Sanctum's Staking-as-a-Service. Confirmed partners and their linked LSTs include:

• Jupiter: jupSOL
• Bybit: bbSOL
• Drift: dSOL
• crypto.com: cdcSOL
• DeFi Dev Corp: dfdvSOL