Solana’s liquid staking ecosystem looked very different two years ago. Marinade and Lido dominated the category, the largest products were measured in hundreds of millions rather than billions, and the use cases for liquid staking tokens (LSTs) were mostly limited to using them as collateral on a handful of lending protocols. By the middle of 2026, the category has transformed. JitoSOL alone has crossed $4 billion in TVL. The total LST supply on Solana is approaching $15 billion. And a new layer — restaking — is starting to look like the next major category to emerge on top of the LST stack.
The shift has happened for two reasons. First, the underlying staking yield on Solana has stayed attractive — sustained around 6-8% APY — while the network’s growth has made staking economically meaningful at scale. Second, the LST ecosystem has matured to the point where holding an LST is genuinely better than holding plain SOL for most users. LSTs are accepted as collateral across nearly every major DeFi protocol, used in concentrated liquidity positions, integrated into yield-bearing structured products, and increasingly used in cross-chain liquidity systems.
The infrastructure underneath this growth is doing more work than most users realize. Tracking LST balances, validating exchange rates, and computing yield accruals across millions of holders requires backend systems that can read and write Solana state at scale. Production LST issuers and the protocols built on top of them generally rely on a dedicated solana web3 api rather than commodity endpoints, because the read-heavy workload patterns these systems generate stress shared infrastructure in characteristic ways.
The LST landscape has consolidated
After several years of fragmentation, the Solana LST market has settled into a clear hierarchy. JitoSOL leads on TVL, partly because of the additional MEV revenue Jito’s validators distribute back to stakers. Marinade’s mSOL holds significant share through its long-running validator delegation strategy. Sanctum has emerged as an important infrastructure layer that lets smaller validators issue their own LSTs through a shared liquidity pool. Several smaller LSTs have found niches in specific verticals or institutional segments.
This consolidation has actually been good for the category. Users get cleaner choices, integrators have fewer LSTs to support, and the largest products have enough scale to invest in security audits, infrastructure redundancy, and integration partnerships. The early cycle of new LST launches has slowed because the bar to compete with the established players has gotten higher.
What restaking actually means in the Solana context
Restaking — the practice of using staked assets to secure additional services beyond the underlying chain consensus — is the next category emerging on top of the LST infrastructure. The concept came from EigenLayer on Ethereum, but Solana’s implementation looks meaningfully different given the chain’s architectural assumptions.
Several Solana restaking protocols have launched over the past year. They generally allow LST holders to delegate their staked SOL (still earning base staking yield) to additional services that pay separate rewards. The services vary, but the categories that have gained traction include:
- Oracle networks needing economic security beyond the value of their native token
- Cross-chain bridges using restaked SOL as part of their security collateral
- Data availability layers that pay rewards to nodes providing storage and bandwidth
- AVS-style services that need slashable economic guarantees from validators
- MEV-aware services that distribute extracted value to participating stakers
The economics are still being worked out
Restaking creates yield stacking — base SOL staking yield plus additional rewards from secured services — but it also stacks risk. A staker delegating their LST to a restaking service is taking on the risk that the service’s slashing conditions could affect their underlying capital. The early experiments have been conservative on this front, but the category has not yet faced a real slashing event, and how the ecosystem handles that when it eventually happens will shape the trajectory significantly.
The yield numbers are attractive for now. Total yields on restaked SOL routinely run 10-15% APY when both base staking and restaking rewards are included. That is meaningful in a world where most stable yield sources have compressed. The question is whether those yields are durable or whether they reflect temporary subsidies from new restaking services trying to bootstrap their networks.
The infrastructure implications
Restaking adds a new layer of complexity to the staking infrastructure stack. Backend systems now need to track LST balances, restaking commitments, slashing conditions, reward distributions from multiple services, and the relationships between them. Three patterns have become standard in production deployments:
- Multi-source reward indexing — combining base staking, MEV rewards, and AVS rewards into unified user-facing yield calculations
- Slashing exposure monitoring — tracking which restaking services a user’s stake is exposed to and surfacing aggregate slashing risk
- Position migration tooling — letting users move stake between LSTs and restaking services without unstaking the underlying SOL
What this category looks like in twelve months
The trajectory of LSTs and restaking on Solana points toward a more layered staking economy. The base layer is plain SOL staking. The next layer is liquid staking through major LSTs. The layer above is restaking those LSTs to secure additional services. Each layer adds yield and risk in ways that are still being calibrated, and each creates infrastructure demands that go beyond what was needed for previous generations of staking products.
The category is significant enough now to be a meaningful piece of the Solana ecosystem rather than a niche use case. Anyone building products that touch staked SOL — wallets, lending protocols, structured product platforms — has had to develop real expertise in how the LST and restaking layers interact. That expertise is becoming a competitive advantage in a way that simply supporting plain staking never was.
Last Updated: May 21, 2026
