原标题：《Why Binance, Bybit and Bitget Want a Piece of the Solana Staking Market》
Author: Sage D. Young, Unchained
Compiled by: Felix, PANews
Solana's liquidity staking ecosystem is growing, with new big players joining.
On August 29, three centralized exchanges, Binance, Bybit, and Bitget, respectively launched new liquidity staking tokens (LST), which will allow holders to earn returns while ensuring the security of the Solana blockchain and still participate in DeFi activities such as lending.
According to DefiLlama data, the liquidity staking ecosystem on Solana has more than doubled so far this year, from $1.9 billion TVL on January 1 to $4.1 billion, with Jito, Marinade and Sanctum accounting for nearly 77% of the market share.
On the X platform, Sanctum hinted at its role in the launch of BNSOL (Binance) and BBSOL (Bybit), responding to Binance’s announcement by using a handshake emoji and stating that it is “ready to help bbSOL grow bigger and stronger” in light of Bybit’s disclosure.
Since the announcement, Sanctum’s governance token CLOUD has risen more than 40%, jumping from 16.9 cents to 25 cents, according to Coingecko data.
Solana’s Booming Liquidity Staking Sector
More and more participants are entering the Solana liquidity staking ecosystem, highlighting the maturity of the LST market on Solana
Marinade is the second largest liquidity staking provider on Solana, with a TVL of US$745 million, and launched LST in 2021; while Jito is the largest liquidity staking provider, with a TVL of nearly US$2.9 billion, and launched its mainnet at the end of 2022.
But the total liquidity staking (which first appeared on Ethereum when Lido Finance launched LST in 2020) TVL is $42.5 billion. Of this, Ethereum accounts for 83% of the market share, several times that of Solana's 9.6%.
Jito Foundation contributor Andrew Thurman added, “About 40% of staked ETH is liquid staked, while only 6% of staked SOL is liquid staked.” “It is expected that the two numbers will gradually approach each other, that is, the Solana liquid stake market still has a lot of room for growth and can accommodate many products.”
Lucas Kozinski, founding contributor of Ethereum re-staking protocol Renzo, said the launch of Solana LST by three exchanges could be a "big deal." "It shows that some of the infrastructure and products we have on Ethereum are just beginning to be launched on Solana." These products will help get users on board with Solana's native DeFi.
Jacob Joseph, research analyst at crypto analytics agency CCData, said: “Solana’s staking ecosystem has expanded rapidly over the past few years, with companies such as Jito and more recently Sanctum joining the ranks.” This “indicates that Solana is receiving increasing attention.”
Launching LST to increase revenue
As for why these exchanges have become active in Solana’s LST ecosystem, Lucas Kozinski, a founding contributor to Ethereum restaking protocol Renzo, said one possible reason is that launching a new LST “can offer additional products to users to earn additional rewards and collect fees from them.”
Binance, the third largest LST by market capitalization, charges a 10% fee on ETH staking rewards. According to its official website, the 10% fee is used to cover operational costs such as hardware and network maintenance for its validator nodes.
Suki Yang, co-founder of LMAO, a Memecoin platform based on Solana, had a similar view. “Imagine if users used Solana liquidity staking tokens on the exchange, then all Binance has to do is take a cut of the returns generated by the liquidity staking tokens… It is entirely in their own interest to do this (launch LST).”
Keep SOL on the exchange
Another possible reason why these centralized exchanges would like to launch LST is that they want to keep as much SOL as possible on their platforms.
Suki Yang, co-founder of LMAO, said that exchanges are like investment banks, optimizing for two indicators: trading volume and asset management scale (AUM). By providing their own LST, users can stake their SOL within the exchange without having to withdraw it.
Without LST, the exchange cannot earn value when tokens are put on the exchange. In addition, the more assets on the platform, the larger the AUM, which increases the company's trust, attractiveness, and financial valuation.
As of August 1, Binance’s SOL net balance (consisting of customer deposits and third-party escrow) was 32,732,433.696 SOL, worth approximately $4.7 billion, or about 7% of the token’s circulating supply. On the other hand, Bybit’s balance as of August 8 contained 2,643,721 SOL, or approximately $375 million.
