Sanctum, a liquid staking infrastructure protocol, has climbed past Jupiter Exchange to claim the top spot among Solana protocols ranked by total value locked. The shift marks a notable change in how capital is being deployed across the Solana ecosystem, with investors increasingly gravitating toward yield-bearing staking products over decentralized exchange aggregation.
By the end of Q2 2026, Sanctum hit an all-time high of 16.64 million SOL in protocol TVL, an 8.2% jump from 15.44 million SOL the prior quarter. At current SOL prices, that translates to roughly $1.28 billion. And by late August, Sanctum’s Validator LSTs had climbed further to approximately $1.66 billion.
The numbers behind the flip
Jupiter held a TVL of around $1.34 billion in June 2026. Sanctum now captures about 2.72% of all circulating SOL, up from 2.02% a year ago.
The protocol’s core innovation is its Infinity pool, a mechanism that provides shared liquidity across a sprawling landscape of liquid staking tokens. Sanctum has powered the creation of somewhere between 200 and over 1,000 LSTs for various partners. Instead of each LST operating in its own isolated pool with limited swap depth, Sanctum’s architecture lets them share liquidity.
Growth story meets revenue pressure
While Sanctum’s TVL has been climbing, its revenue moved in the opposite direction during Q2 2026. The protocol pulled in $880K in revenue for the quarter, down 39.7% from the prior period.
On the product side, Sanctum launched a mobile app in July 2026 that attracted over 9,000 users in its early days.
What liquid staking’s rise means for Solana
In earlier cycles, DEX aggregators like Jupiter sat at the center of the value chain because trading activity was the primary use case. Jupiter built an enormous moat around that function and still operates one of the most important pieces of Solana’s DeFi stack.
Liquid staking captures capital that might otherwise sit idle in native staking or in wallets doing nothing, offering the ability to earn staking rewards while maintaining liquidity. Across the broader crypto landscape, liquid staking has been one of the fastest-growing DeFi categories. Ethereum’s liquid staking ecosystem exploded after the Shapella upgrade made withdrawals possible, and a similar dynamic appears to be playing out on Solana with Sanctum at the center.