Solana liquid staking wraps delegated SOL in a liquid staking token (LST) \u2014 a transferable SPL receipt minted by a stake pool that keeps earning validator rewards while you hold, trade, or lend it. The four that matter are jitoSOL (Jito), mSOL (Marinade), bSOL (BlazeStake) and INF (Sanctum Infinity). An LST never pays out new tokens: it appreciates against SOL every epoch, so one unit redeems for progressively more SOL. That design is what makes the receipt usable as collateral on Kamino, MarginFi and Drift, and what lets a holder exit staked SOL through a DEX swap instead of a multi-day unstake queue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
A stake pool is a smart contract that aggregates SOL from thousands of depositors, delegates it across a validator set, and mints an LST back at the pool’s current exchange rate. Deposit through Gem Wallet, Phantom, or Solflare and the SOL leaves your account while the LST arrives in the same transaction. From there the pool handles delegation, rebalancing and reward collection \u2014 you hold a token, not a stake account. The version where you keep the stake account and skip the wrapper is our native delegation walkthrough<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The validator set is where the four diverge. Jito delegates only to validators running the Jito-Solana client, which auctions block-building rights and rebates MEV tips into the pool. Marinade scores 100+ validators algorithmically, penalizing downtime, commission spikes and stake concentration. BlazeStake spreads across 200+ validators, the widest set of any Solana stake pool. Sanctum is not a pool at all: it is infrastructure letting validators mint their own branded LST, with INF as the index token holding a basket of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This trips up people coming from native staking, where the stake account balance visibly grows every epoch. LSTs use an exchange rate model instead: the pool’s total SOL grows with each epoch’s rewards, but LST supply only changes when someone mints or burns. The ratio of SOL-per-LST drifts up epoch after epoch, so yield shows up as a rising redemption value rather than a rising balance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is why 1 mSOL is worth about 1.37 SOL and 1 jitoSOL about 1.29 SOL as of August 6, 2026 \u2014 cumulative staking history, not a premium. Buy mSOL at 1.30, sell at 1.37, and you collected the yield in full with no claim transaction. It also keeps the token clean for DeFi: a lending market prices a non-rebasing asset on a rising oracle far more easily than one whose balance mutates.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhy an LST Gets More Expensive Instead of Paying You<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
jitoSOL vs mSOL vs bSOL vs INF<\/h2>\n\n\n\n