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News of today’s CoinDesk layoffs was sad to read. It’s also a good reminder of how hard it is to stay editorially independent on such a financialized beat. That’s a North Star that I’m happy that Blockworks values, and we’ll keep doing our best to cover the news truthfully in this newsletter.

Today, we’ve got creator coins, LST market share, and a news roundup:

Solana liquid staking startup Sanctum trials ‘creator coins’

Sanctum, the Solana startup focused on growing the network’s liquid staking ecosystem, launched a new primitive today called creator coins. 

Creator coins are essentially Solana liquid staking tokens that Sanctum issues while giving the yield to creators. Fans can earn loyalty points for holding creator coins, and creators can use those points to dole out perks. It’s a new spin on an old concept in crypto, but Sanctum thinks launching with more crypto-native creators can help it pick up adoption where others have failed.

Sanctum is a newer startup that came up through the Solana Foundation’s startup incubator this spring and promised to create an “infinite LST future” on Solana. Its initial flagship product was called INF — a token that helps provide liquidity to a pool of Solana LSTs.

It then carried out a much-hyped airdrop focused on “earnestness” that ignited some controversy over the summer. Since then, Sanctum has been a bit quieter, most notably launching LSTs with Asia-based crypto exchanges including Binance in the early fall. 

Creator coins are a concept Sanctum has seemingly toyed with for a while as well — co-founder FP Lee created the fpSOL liquid staking token as a “personal LST” experiment in May. 

Creator coin holders forgo their SOL staking yield to support creators. Sanctum takes a small cut of this as well, Sanctum’s anonymous co-founder J told me. Sanctum’s Solana staking APY is around 10% on average, J added.

In exchange, users earn “seeds,” which are loyalty points that can track fans’ investment and let creators offer loyalty perks. 

When I asked why creator coins couldn’t just pass along some staking yield to users while charging a commission for the creators, J said giving creators all the rewards “makes economic sense for now,” but this could be changed in the future.

One obvious target audience for creator coins is celebrities who — like the “Hawk Tuah” girl — seem to keep launching volatile memecoins that end in lawsuits or reputational damage. Creator coins may come with less immediate upside, but they also come with less risk. 

Still, Sanctum isn’t the first to try luring creators with crypto-based loyalty programs. Jack Harlow joined a loyalty platform named MITH last year, for instance, but other creators appear to be somewhat slow to adopt the platform, which hasn’t posted on X since May. As a response to this, Sanctum is limiting creator coins to just crypto creators for now.

“A lot of previous attempts often failed because there's a certain disconnect between the creator and their supporters,” J said. “This is why we didn't necessarily want to get the biggest creators for the beta launch. We wanted Solana folks who were really dialed in and connected to their fanbase.”

— Jack Kubinec

Brought to you by:

Renaud Partners is the premier go-to-market consulting firm for early-stage Solana teams.

We’ve been deeply involved in the community since 2021, supporting some of the best known projects in the ecosystem. We help teams with their go-to-market, brand positioning, social and PR, and fundraising strategy, and we also work across other ecosystems including Monad, Base and TON.

If you're a team looking to expedite your marketing success, let’s talk: [email protected] or @rockin_renaud on telegram.

Here’s a chart we haven’t covered in a little while:

This is the handful of largest Solana LSTs currently (I cut out a bunch of smaller LSTs totaling around 15% of the market). JitoSOL still reigns supreme with 39% market share, followed by mSOL, bnSOL, and jupSOL at 10-15% apiece.

The biggest story in recent days is bnSOL, which is Binance’s liquid staking token, launched in collaboration with Sanctum. Binance’s massive market share makes nearly any product it launches a notable one in crypto.

— Jack Kubinec

Brought to you by:

Renaud Partners is the premier go-to-market consulting firm for early-stage Solana teams.

We’ve been deeply involved in the community since 2021, supporting some of the best known projects in the ecosystem. We help teams with their go-to-market, brand positioning, social and PR, and fundraising strategy, and we also work across other ecosystems including Monad, Base and TON.

If you're a team looking to expedite your marketing success, let’s talk: [email protected] or @rockin_renaud on telegram.

News you may have missed from Solanaland this week:

• Squid has partnered with Chainflip to expand its cross-chain functionality, now supporting direct swaps to native SOL, BTC, and USDC, with plans to add more tokens and routes soon.

• Bitwise has launched the Bitwise Solana Staking ETP (BSOL) on the German stock exchange Xetra, offering institutional-grade access to staked SOL with optimized rewards.

• Anza has introduced SIMD-0204, marking the first step toward slashing penalties on Solana. This proposal focuses on identifying and recording validator violations, setting the stage for future penalty mechanisms.

• Robinhood has listed the Solana memecoin BONK, allowing users in select European Union jurisdictions to trade the asset through its platform.

• VanEck has invested $2.5 million in DAWN, a Solana-based DePIN project creating decentralized wireless networks to democratize internet access and disrupt traditional ISPs.

• Eliza Labs has partnered with Stanford University's Future of Digital Currency Initiative (FDCI) to explore how autonomous AI agents can transform digital currency systems.

• Iggy Azalea has soft-launched Motherland, a crypto casino powered by her memecoin, MOTHER, offering games, live tournaments, and sports betting, now live as a digital hub for the crypto community.

• Chainalysis now maps every fungible Solana token as soon as it launches, making it easier for institutions to stay compliant and track token activity across the network.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Jeffy Yu, creator of the AI agent Zerebro: