Solana liquid staking tokens (LSTs) are tradable tokens a stake pool mints when you deposit SOL. The pool stakes your coins with validators, and the token keeps earning staking yield while staying free to trade, lend, or use in DeFi. In 2026 the market runs on five major tokens: jitoSOL, bnSOL, jupSOL, INF, and mSOL.
The earning happens through the token's exchange rate, not through payouts. Deposit $1,000 of SOL and you receive tokens at the going rate. A year later you hold the same number of tokens, but each one can be redeemed for more SOL, because the rewards piled up inside the pool. Whether to hold an LST at all, rather than staking natively, is its own decision. This article is for the step after, and that step got harder. jitoSOL, once the obvious default, now holds roughly 20% of the liquid-staked market, down from about 35%, with four serious rivals behind it.
And the five tokens print different headline rates built from different ingredients, so the labels cannot be compared at face value until you know what each one is made of.
How a liquid staking token actually earns
Every major Solana LST earns the same way underneath. The pool delegates deposited SOL to validators, the validators earn staking rewards each epoch, and those rewards flow back into the pool. Nothing is paid out to you. Instead, the amount of SOL each token can be redeemed for rises, epoch after epoch.
Most of the big tokens run on the same open-source machinery, the SPL stake pool program. It holds the stake accounts, manages the validator list, and updates the token's redeem value every epoch (source: SPL Stake Pool program documentation). An epoch is Solana's reward cycle of roughly two days, part of the chain's basic rhythm. That design has a practical result: an LST's "price" in SOL should climb slowly and steadily. Say 1 jitoSOL was worth 1.10 SOL when you bought, and the pool earns about 6%. A year later each token backs roughly 1.17 SOL. Your token count never changed. The value behind each token did.
The base rate everything builds on is Solana's native staking yield. It runs around 5.5-6.5% net today, and it drifts lower by design as the network's issuance schedule steps down (source: StakingRewards' Solana staking data). Every LST starts from that same raw material. What separates them is what each issuer adds on top, takes out in fees, or restructures wholesale. That is where the five majors stop being interchangeable. The deposit steps themselves are simple, and Blofin's step-by-step staking guide covers both the native route and the pool route.
Same engine under every token. So why are there suddenly five that matter?
One market, five majors: how the field split
The Solana LST market fragmented between 2024 and 2026. jitoSOL's share of liquid-staked SOL fell from roughly 35% to just over 20% (source: SolanaCompass' 2026 Solana outlook). Around it grew an exchange token (bnSOL), an aggregator's token (jupSOL), a basket token (INF), and a long tail of validator-branded tokens.
Two forces drove the split. First, issuing an LST stopped being hard. Rails providers, Sanctum chief among them, now let any validator, app, or exchange launch a branded token that plugs into shared liquidity. A project that once would have routed stake to an existing pool now mints its own. Second, big distribution arrived. Binance put an LST in front of every SOL holder on its exchange, and Jupiter put one in front of every swap user. Distribution, more than technology, redrew the staking map of the Solana network.
The sizes as of May 2026:
| Token / group | TVL (May 2026) | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Sanctum validator LSTs (aggregate) | ~$1.33B | Dozens of validator- and app-branded tokens on shared rails |
| bnSOL | ~$1.07B | Binance's exchange-issued LST |
| jitoSOL | ~$938M | The MEV-capture pioneer, largest single token by share |
| jupSOL | ~$914M | Jupiter's validator token with subsidized yield |
| mSOL | ~$305M | Marinade's token, the original Solana LST |
(source: Datawallet's Solana staking statistics)
The whole category is also claiming a bigger slice of the SOL token's staked supply. By late 2025, 17.6% of all staked SOL was in liquid form, up from 11.6% a quarter earlier, the largest quarterly jump on record. More SOL is arriving in LST form while the market splinters. That is exactly why a size table is not enough. The table tells you how big each token is. It does not tell you what each token is.
The five majors, token by token
Each of the five raises the same three questions: who runs it, where the yield comes from, and what you accept in exchange. The honest answers differ token by token. None of the five is simply "the same thing with a different logo."
jitoSOL: the pioneer that lost its lock on the market
jitoSOL is the Jito stake pool's token, and its signature idea is MEV capture. The pool delegates only to validators running MEV-enabled client software. Those validators earn extra income from how transactions are ordered and packaged, and that income flows into the pool alongside regular staking rewards. jitoSOL made "staking yield plus MEV" the standard everyone else now measures against. It remains the largest single LST at roughly 20% of the liquid market, takes about 4% of rewards as the pool fee, and has among the deepest DeFi integrations of any token here (source: SolanaCompass stake pools directory). The client-software story it helped push also matters beyond yield. Client diversity among validators, including the Firedancer client, is a big part of why doubts about the network's reliability have faded. jitoSOL's caveat is simple: its era as the only serious answer is over, and it now competes on yield and liquidity rather than default status.
bnSOL: the exchange-backed one
bnSOL is Binance's staked-SOL token. Deposit SOL through the exchange's earn product, receive bnSOL, and the token's conversion rate against SOL rises each epoch as rewards accrue (source: StakingRewards' Binance Staked SOL data). You can hold it on the exchange, or withdraw it on-chain and use it in Solana DeFi like any other LST. Its growth to roughly $1.07B, second among single tokens, came from reach: an exchange can put a staking product one tap away from every SOL balance it hosts. What you accept in return is concentration in a single company. One exchange operates the issuance and redemption gateway, so your view of bnSOL is partly a view of that operator. That is a different kind of trust than the program-and-validators trust the on-chain pools ask for. It is not a flaw so much as a shape: exchange-backed convenience, exchange-shaped dependency.
jupSOL: the subsidized headline rate
jupSOL, built on Sanctum's rails for Jupiter, stakes deposits to Jupiter's own validator, and its headline APY usually tops the big five. Read the label carefully, because part of that yield is a subsidy. Jupiter passes through 100% of native staking rewards, charging zero commission. It also passes through 100% of MEV tips and 80-100% of block rewards, keeping essentially nothing. The only charge is a 0.1% deposit fee that exists to block an arbitrage exploit (source: JupSOL fee and yield structure on IQ.wiki). Giving away the validator's entire revenue is a growth policy, not a durable property of staking economics, and policy can change. jupSOL holders also lean on one validator operation rather than a spread. The honest read: a real, currently-generous rate whose premium over the market is optional, and should be treated as bonus rather than baseline.
INF: the dual-yield basket
INF, Sanctum's Infinity token, is built differently from everything above. It is not a claim on one stake pool but a share of a pool that holds a basket of many LSTs plus some unstaked SOL. That gives it two yield streams at once. The basket earns the blended staking yield of everything inside it. The pool also collects trading fees whenever anyone swaps one LST for another through it, which pushes INF's rate above plain staking in active markets (source: Sanctum's liquid staking guide). The price of that extra stream is extra machinery: basket weights, pricing of each token inside, and pool code on top of pool code. INF behaves less like "staked SOL with liquidity" and more like a small automated fund of staked-SOL products. If you want the simplest possible claim on staking yield, that is a reason to pause. If you are comfortable with DeFi structures, it is the interesting one.
mSOL: the original, now mid-pack
mSOL is Marinade's token and the one that started the category in 2021, years before "LST" was a common word (source: Marinade's protocol documentation). Its design goal has always leaned toward network health. Deposits are spread across a long list of validators rather than piled on a few, which supports a wider validator base and reduces dependence on any single operator. Its yield has trailed the MEV-heavy tokens over the years, because less of that transaction-ordering income flows through. The market has judged that trade harshly. At roughly $305M TVL, mSOL now sits mid-pack in a race it once led. It remains a reasonable pick if you weight validator spread and a long, unbroken record above the last half percent of yield. Its history also carries a useful caution for every younger token on this page: category leadership rotates.
Five profiles, five different recipes for what looks like the same number. Put them side by side and the differences get concrete.
Reading the yield label: what an APY is made of
An LST's advertised APY is a stack of layers, and the layers age differently. Base staking yield is the durable floor. MEV income is real but varies with network activity. Issuer subsidies can end at any time, and trading-fee income depends on volumes. Comparing tokens means comparing recipes, not headline numbers.
| Token | Structure | Yield recipe | Fee | The watch-out |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| jitoSOL | On-chain stake pool | Base staking + MEV tips | ~4% of rewards | Default-choice era is over; compare, don't assume |
| bnSOL | Exchange-issued token | Base staking via Binance's validators | Built into rate | Single-operator issuance and redemption |
| jupSOL | Single-validator pool (Sanctum rails) | Base + MEV + subsidy (0% commission passthrough) | 0.1% deposit | Premium is policy, not economics; can end |
| INF | Basket of LSTs + SOL in a swap pool | Blended basket yield + trading fees | Small swap/withdraw fees | Most moving parts; fund-like structure |
| mSOL | On-chain stake pool, wide validator spread | Base staking, lighter MEV | Commission on rewards | Yield trails MEV-heavy rivals |
Now put dollars on it. On $10,000 at a 6% base rate, a year of staking yield is about $600. jitoSOL's roughly 4% fee on rewards costs about $24 of that. A subsidy worth an extra 0.7 percentage points, roughly what a zero-commission passthrough can add, is about $70 a year, and it can vanish with one policy decision. The gaps are real money but rarely life-changing money. That is why chasing the top of the APY table into a structure you do not understand is usually a bad trade. Where the rewards come from in the first place, inflation issuance plus priority fees plus MEV, is its own subject. It also explains one more label trap: the base rate declines by design, so every token's headline will drift down over the years no matter which you pick.
Matching token to holder beats ranking them. If you keep funds on an exchange anyway and want staking with zero on-chain steps, an exchange token like bnSOL fits how you already operate. If you live in Solana DeFi and want the deepest integrations, jitoSOL's footprint is the argument. If you want the highest current rate and accept that part of it is promotional, jupSOL is that trade stated plainly. If you want spread-out exposure across the whole category with extra fee income, INF is the structured answer. And if a wide validator base is your first filter, mSOL was built for you. Buying any of them starts the same way, with SOL in hand, and buying SOL is the step before all of this.
One structural note applies across the board. Since June 2026, opening a new native stake account requires at least 1 SOL, after the SIMD-0490 upgrade raised the minimum for new accounts (source: SIMD-0490 proposal). Stake pools are not bound by that floor, and most accept much smaller deposits. For balances under 1 SOL, the liquid route is now effectively the only self-custody way to earn staking yield. A rule aimed at native accounts quietly made LSTs the small holder's default.
Whichever recipe you choose, though, you are buying into one shared set of risks, and those deserve their own section.
The risks every liquid staking token shares
All five majors carry the same three class-level risks on top of ordinary market risk. The token can trade below the value of the SOL behind it (a de-peg). The pool or issuer machinery can fail. And the yield itself can fall. None of these is exotic, and none is priced into a headline APY.
De-pegs are a market event, not usually a pool failure. An LST's fair value is set by what the pool will redeem it for, but its instant price is set by order books, and order books thin out under stress. If many holders rush to sell at once, the token can trade at a discount for hours or days. You only take that loss if you sell into it. A holder who waits out the pool's slower redemption queue exits at the underlying rate. Depth varies sharply across the five majors and drops off fast beyond them. That is why exit liquidity sits on the checklist below, and why Blofin's guide to staking risks on Solana is worth reading before your position gets large.
Slashing deserves the precise version, because LST marketing sometimes rounds it to "your principal is never at risk." Solana today has no live slashing. No protocol mechanism destroys a misbehaving validator's stake or the SOL delegated to it. What shipped with SIMD-0204 is the evidence layer: an on-chain way to record proof of slashable behavior, with no automatic penalty attached yet (source: Helius' analysis of slashing on Solana). So "no slashing" is today's status, not a permanent promise, and a market this young should be described in the present tense. The network's own reliability story, meanwhile, has genuinely improved. The chain's outage history is largely that, history. But an LST adds pool and issuer machinery on top of the chain, and that machinery is where LST-specific failures would live.
From Blofin's operational perspective, the pattern with yield products on the platform is consistent: deposits cluster wherever the headline rate is highest that week, and the questions about where the rate comes from arrive only after it moves. Blofin does not issue a Solana LST, which is partly why this comparison can stay neutral. The habit we would point any user toward is reading a yield's mix the way you would read an ingredient label, before the deposit rather than after.
Before buying any LST, five checks:
- Find the yield's mix: how much is base staking, how much MEV, how much subsidy or fee income.
- Find the fee, and confirm it against the issuer's own docs, not a third-party table.
- Check exit liquidity: how much of the token trades daily, and at what depth, in the pair you would actually sell through.
- Name what you are trusting: a program and validator set, one validator's operation, an exchange, or a basket structure.
- Start small, in a wallet you control, and test the full round trip, including moving the token and swapping a little back to SOL, before committing size.
A holder who has run those five checks knows more about their LST than most of the market knew about jitoSOL at its 35% peak. The questions below cover what the checks do not.
Frequently asked questions
Can you hold Solana LSTs on an exchange, or only in a wallet?
Both, with caveats. bnSOL lives natively on Binance and can also be withdrawn on-chain. The on-chain tokens (jitoSOL, jupSOL, INF, mSOL) sit in self-custody wallets by default, and only some exchanges accept them as deposits. Holding an LST on an exchange stacks custodial risk on top of the token's own structure. Many holders therefore keep LSTs in a wallet and keep exchange balances in plain SOL.
What happens to an LST if its issuer's company shuts down?
For on-chain pool tokens, the stake lives in on-chain accounts governed by the pool program, not on the issuer's servers. Redemption generally keeps working even if the issuing team walks away; what decays is upkeep, validator-list curation, and integrations. An exchange-issued token is different, because redemption runs through the operator, so the issuer's health matters directly. This is the deepest practical gap between bnSOL and the rest of the five.
Why does an LST keep rising against SOL, and is that gain taxable?
The rise is the yield. Rewards pile up in the pool, so each token redeems for more SOL over time. Whether that growth is taxed as it happens, only when you sell, or as income at receipt varies by country, and reward-bearing tokens like these sit in a genuinely unsettled area of many tax codes. Keep dated records of deposit rates and redeem rates, and put the question to a qualified tax professional where you live.
Are the smaller validator-branded LSTs beyond the big five safe to use?
They run on the same shared rails as some of the majors, so the program-level risk is similar. But two things shrink with size: trading depth and scrutiny. A small token can be fine to hold and painful to exit, because thin markets widen the discount in any rush for the door. If you use one, treat exit liquidity as the first check, size the position to what the market could absorb, and expect less public analysis of its validators.
Can you swap one LST directly for another?
Yes, and you usually do not need to unstake in between. Aggregators route LST-to-LST trades, and Sanctum's Infinity pool exists partly to make those swaps cheap by holding many LSTs in one place. One practical care: check the quoted rate against each token's redeem value, since you are trading two moving exchange rates at once. A bad quote can quietly cost more than a pool fee ever would.
Do you ever need to claim rewards on these tokens?
No. None of the five majors hands out rewards you must collect; the value accrues inside the token's exchange rate on its own. If a site or message asks you to "claim" LST staking rewards, treat it as a likely phishing attempt, because the real mechanism has nothing to claim. The absence of a claim step is one of the quiet security advantages of the exchange-rate design.
Researched and written by the Blofin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. Primary sources include the SPL Stake Pool program documentation, the JupSOL fee and yield breakdown, Sanctum's liquid staking guide, Marinade's protocol documentation, the SIMD-0490 proposal in the Solana Improvement Documents repository, and Helius' analysis of slashing on Solana. Market data drawn from Datawallet's Solana staking statistics, the SolanaCompass stake pools directory and 2026 outlook, and StakingRewards' Solana and Binance Staked SOL data. All facts independently verified against cited documentation current as of July 2026.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice, investment guidance, or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any digital asset. Cryptocurrency markets involve significant risk and you should conduct your own research and consult qualified professionals before making investment decisions. Blofin Academy content reflects the state of public information at time of publication; protocol parameters, fees, and ecosystem data change frequently.