It's not my style to bluster and yap: I prefer to let our products speak for themselves. Over the past year, INF has outperformed mSOL by ~130 basis points, and JitoSOL by ~150 basis points. If you had put in 100,000 SOL on 22 March 2024, you would have earned an extra 1,490 SOL than if you held JitoSOL – a 17.28% increase.
If you go to our new page you'll see historical data (going back 12 months) comparing INF to native staking or other non-Sanctum LSTs.
What is INF, and what explains its continued performance?
INF is the liquidity nexus of all LSTs on Solana. It makes two core promises:
- (For depositors) Gives you the best risk-adjusted returns on your SOL.
- (For our partners) Provides deep SOL liquidity for your LST.
Infinity is an "LST of LSTs". It holds LSTs (JupSOL, bbSOL, dSOL etc.) and SOL, and facilitates trades between them. Uniquely, Infinity earns:
- inflation and MEV rewards from staking;
- extra block rewards (many of our LST partners share block rewards with their LST holders); and
- trading fees between LSTs or between LSTs and SOL (Infinity only).
These three sources of yield combine to generate long-term outperformance.
Future SIMDs like SIMD-159 and SIMD-228 will affect the performance of all LSTs and thus INF, but as LST penetration increases and as we continue improving Infinity, I expect trading fees to make up a larger and larger percentage of INF yield.
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A short story:
When we started in 2021, everyone thought liquid staking was "winner-take-all". The received wisdom was that LSTs compete on liquidity depth and "moneyness". And so when liquid staking first came to Solana, we saw Marinade and Lido fight to give out millions in incentives on Saber/Orca/Raydium pools to establish themselves as THE liquid staking token. But in the end, it was only Alameda and professional capital rotators that benefited.
The thing I like most about INF is that it helps us move liquid staking from winner-take-all to we-win-together.
- As Infinity grows, the pool of SOL liquidity available for all LSTs grows – larger than anything individual LSTs could incentivise themselves.
- The more liquidity grows, the more compelling and powerful liquid staking will become.
- And the more powerful liquid staking becomes, the more we'll be able to grow from less than 4% stake (before Sanctum) to ~10% (now) to ~100% of stake in LSTs.
In the crypto space, there is always too much naked competition. Very PvP energy, a lot of dancing over the corpses of others… that is not the Sanctum way. Infinity is something Sanctum can be proud of because we are building a moat that grows bigger by working and helping others, not extinguishing them.