On the evening of August 29, the crypto community observed a series of announcements from these three major exchanges—Binance, Bybit, and Bitget—indicating their intention to support liquid staking tokens on Solana (SOL).
Specifically, Binance tweeted “BNSOL,” suggesting that this could be the ticker symbol for Solana’s SOL liquid staking token issued through their platform.
Following Binance’s lead, Bybit and Bitget revealed similar tokens under the ticker symbols BBSOL and BGSOL, respectively.
At this time, it remains uncertain whether these developments are part of a coordinated effort or simply a coincidence of shared strategies.
Liquid staking allows DeFi users to lock up a network's native token in exchange for receiving another token that represents the locked amount, which can be further utilized. Since 2023, liquid staking has gained significant traction in the Ethereum ecosystem, with protocols like Lido, Rocket Pool, and Frax reaching billions in Total Value Locked (TVL). Additionally, derivatives such as restaking/liquid restaking have emerged, featuring notable projects like EigenLayer, Symbiotic, Karak, ether.fi, Renzo, Kelp DAO, Puffer Finance, and Swell.
Despite its popularity on Ethereum, liquid staking has not yet expanded significantly to other layer-1 networks. However, the recent moves by these centralized exchanges (CEXs) may signal the beginning of such an expansion.
According to data from DefiLlama, Solana’s liquid staking sector currently holds a TVL of $4.1 billion, with prominent protocols like Jito, Marinade, Sanctum, and Jupiter. This figure represents only one-eighth of the $35.3 billion in liquid staking assets on Ethereum, suggesting substantial growth potential for Solana’s liquid staking market. Such growth could also open up new use cases and help Solana move beyond its "memecoin chain" reputation.
Following the news that Sanctum, the third-largest liquid staking protocol on Solana, might be partnering with Binance, Bybit, and Bitget for the launch of these new liquid staking tokens, the value of its CLOUD token surged by over 50% within the last 24 hours.
The recent price movements of Sanctum’s CLOUD token, captured in a screenshot from CoinMarketCap at 11:50 PM on August 29, 2024, reflect the market's response to these developments.
