Why We're Building Sanctum App Now

At Solana Breakpoint, we announced Sanctum App, our upcoming mobile experience for earning and holding assets onchain.

In this blog, we’ll color in the lines a bit. Here’s our view on who we’re building the app for, the overall opportunity it presents, and why we believe now is the right moment to go to market.

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Crypto is growing up. Internet capital markets are arriving faster than most people realize, and the rails being built today will shape how value is created, transacted, and preserved for decades to come. But despite that progress, most crypto apps still optimize for a very narrow slice of global users and behaviors that are misaligned with that long-term outlook.

Those apps function largely as casinos. They cater to short-term horizons and speculative instincts, offering leverage, perpetual trading, and memecoins as primary entry points.

We believe the real opportunity lies elsewhere.

The overwhelming majority of people simply want to hold good assets, grow their wealth over time, and participate in the global economy without needing to think about markets every hour of the day. They want to build a good life responsibly over time, not gamble their net worth in the trenches.

We’re launching Sanctum App for those people.

As we continue to build, we’re carefully considering how each component of the app contributes, or detracts from, the encouragement of the long-term accumulation of high-quality assets. The Minimum Delightful Product (MDP) will start with SOL yields (the domain where Sanctum is already the category leader) and will expand thoughtfully over time.

This is not an attempt to build an everything app. It is an attempt to build the right app for the right user base that maintains the right mindset.

We’ve always been comfortable taking contrarian positions.

Three years ago, the prevailing industry belief was that Solana liquid staking tokens were winner-take-all, that one LST would dominate and everything else would fade. Our view was different. We believed that if we could enable anyone to easily create an LST at a low marginal cost, and if we could build a unified liquidity layer to service them, the result would be an explosion of experimentation.

That is exactly what happened.

Today, there are hundreds of LSTs, and Sanctum sits at the center of that ecosystem. We succeeded in defining the LST category and changing the meta.

We are making a similar bet with Sanctum App.

While much of the industry races to build the everything app to supply an all-you-can-eat buffet of impulsive behavior, we are choosing to build something deliberately narrow in focus and emotionally calm.

Two beliefs are guiding our process:

1. Most users should not be pushed toward the many ways to lose money in crypto. Instead, they should be guided toward patience, discipline, and long-term ownership.
2. Building a product aligned with those values will earn the Sanctum brand the deeper trust and lasting loyalty of the users who join us.

We are actively developing two new app features that align with these beliefs. We’ll share more on these soon.

Since the collapse of FTX, the general population (i.e., “normies”) has been largely absent from the crypto industry, and it’s no grand mystery why.

The risks associated with the industry, at least as they are commonly perceived, simply do not align with most people’s tolerance for risk. Faced with that mismatch, many have chosen not to participate at all.

Even the largest exchanges, impressive as they are, still reach only a small fraction of the global population. Binance, for example, has roughly 25 million funded accounts, representing about 0.3% of the world’s population.

For that reason, we don’t believe the next wave of adoption will come from encouraging people to take on more risk (that’s how crypto gets reactions like this). We believe it will come from showing them that onchain financial rails can offer a better way to grow wealth over time, and by giving them tools that reflect how people actually want to manage their money.

Fortunately, from a timing perspective, the industry is beginning to change.

The memecoin frenzy has cooled, and fundamentals are steadily returning to investors’ attention. As the pendulum swings back toward long-term thinking, we believe a broader audience may once again begin engaging with crypto in a meaningful way. That shift is a key reason why now is the right moment to bring Sanctum App to market.

Overall, the app is our attempt to meet those people where they are.

It’s being designed to feel welcoming, understandable, and safe, while still delivering real onchain performance. No pressure to trade. No incentives to gamble. Just a clear path to holding quality assets and letting time do the work.