Jack Paul 
Solana’s DeFi rankings just shifted. Sanctum, a liquid staking infrastructure protocol, has moved ahead of Jupiter Exchange to become the top Solana protocol by total value locked. The change wasn’t loud, but it tells you something about where capital is heading on the network: toward staking yield, not just trading volume.
How Sanctum Overtook Jupiter
By the end of Q2 2026, Sanctum’s TVL reached an all-time high of 16.64 million SOL, up 7.8% from the previous quarter. At then-current prices, that was around $1.28 billion. By late August, the number had climbed to roughly $1.66 billion. Jupiter, by comparison, sat at about $1.34 billion in June.
Sanctum’s share of circulating SOL also rose. The protocol now holds about 2.72% of all SOL in circulation, up from 2.02% twelve months earlier. That’s a meaningful jump when every percentage point represents billions in staked value.
The Infinity Pool and Shared Liquidity
The main engine behind this growth is Sanctum’s Infinity pool. It addresses a common problem in liquid staking: fragmentation. Many liquid staking tokens have their own thin pools, which makes swapping difficult and expensive. Sanctum instead pools liquidity across many LSTs at once, so users can move in and out without slippage eating into returns.
The protocol supports a large range of validator-branded LSTs. Estimates vary, but some put the number above 1,000 depending on how they are counted. That breadth makes the shared pool more useful, since more tokens plugged into the same liquidity means deeper markets for everyone.
Revenue Fell Even as TVL Climbed
TVL didn’t tell the whole story. Sanctum’s revenue in Q2 2026 was $880K, down 39.7% from the previous period. That’s a strange position for a protocol that’s growing so quickly. The gap between rising deposits and falling income suggests fee structures or incentive programs may not be capturing value at the same rate. It’s worth paying attention to, because record TVL doesn’t always mean a healthy business underneath.
Mobile Launch and a Changing DeFi Landscape
Sanctum also launched a mobile app in July 2026. It pulled in more than 9,000 users early on. That’s not huge by mainstream app standards, but for a DeFi protocol that usually lives inside browser interfaces, it shows an attempt to reach a wider audience.
The shift at the top of Solana’s leaderboard says something about where the network’s DeFi capital is going. Jupiter remains an essential piece of Solana infrastructure, and trading isn’t going anywhere. But liquid staking lets people earn rewards without locking assets away entirely. That combination is drawing more money. If the trend continues, the protocols that control the deepest staking liquidity may matter just as much as the ones that process the most trades.