Bankless: A Guide to Solana’s Liquidity Staking Platform Sanctum

Author: William M. Peaster, Bankless; Translator: Deng Tong, Golden Finance

You have some SOL in your wallet - what can it do?

Liquidity staking is becoming a more popular option; this requires staking your SOL to a staking pool rather than directly to the Solana network. In the process, you receive a token representing your staked SOL, the Liquid Staking Token (LST).

What are the advantages of this approach? Liquidity and passive income. With LST, you can keep a liquid version of your staked SOL that you can borrow or trade as needed, while still earning Solana staking rewards from your underlying pool position.

Just like Ethereum, there are now a variety of LST products on Solana, such as Jupiter's jupSOL, BONK's bonkSOL, Helium's hSOL, and more. The APY of these Solana LSTs has been around 7-10% recently, which is attractive in itself.

Sanctum has been getting a lot of attention for its Wonderland rewards program, which goes a step further and lets you stake your SOL LST into additional rewards programs for potential airdrops with just a few clicks.

Sanctum is a liquid staking platform on Solana that is dedicated to becoming a base for SOL LST users. Currently, the main products of the Sanctum Web App include:

• Infinity — for depositing LST or SOL into Sanctum’s premier product, the Infinity Pool, to receive yield-bearing Infinity (INF) tokens;

• Trading — for quickly swapping in or out of any Sanctum-allowed LST;

• Staking Accounts — for converting regular SOL staking accounts to LST;

• LST — for finding and learning more about the LSTs supported by Sanctum.

These are all useful in themselves, but where things really get interesting is Sanctum’s new Wonderland Rewards program.

The Sanctum game is about collecting pets, you can get pets by holding allowed LST and upgrade them with EXP points, each LST has its own unique pet.

After joining Wonderland, you only need to have at least 0.1 worth of relevant LST to get a pet, and you can earn 10 EXP every minute for every 1 SOL worth of supported LST you hold.

The evolution mechanism is coming soon, and each pet can go through three evolutions, up to level 999. You can also get experience multipliers by completing the upcoming community tasks.

That being said, Wonderland is an easy and fun way to participate in SOL LST, and it’s safe to assume that participation will factor into future airdrops should Sanctum launch a native governance token.

Interested in it? It’s pretty simple: head to app.sanctum.so/wonderland, connect your Solana wallet of choice, and follow the instructions in the subsequent pop-up window to complete the process.

That’s all it takes!

But remember that you’ll need to hold at least 0.1 SOL in eligible LST to start accruing points. If you still need to buy some, the quickest way to do so is through Sanctum’s Exchange Center. Once you’ve redeemed for the token of your choice, you’ll automatically start accruing experience points.

Also, remember that once you join Wonderland, you will be given a referral code, and you will earn 5% of the EXP earned by the people you refer. You will also earn Referral Cupcakes, which can be redeemed for bonus XP later.

Looking ahead, Sanctum is aiming to launch Wonderland long-term over multiple seasons, while continually adding new partners and quests. Therefore, Season 1 is a chance to qualify early for what could become a lucrative Solana airdrop opportunity!