Liquid staking rose to prominence in 2023 with Lido, among other providers, seeing significant recoveries and increases in TVL for liquid staked $ETH. Liquid staking gives new use cases to otherwise locked liquidity. While staking rewards and voter participation may be enticing for some, many yearn for additional opportunities to put their capital to work again, which is where liquid staking comes in. Now, the practice has spread to a variety of chains, namely, Solana.
Naturally, liquid staking protocols are the leaders of Solana in terms of TVL, with lending markets like Marginfi and Kamino, holding 60% and 50% of their TVL in LSTs, respectively. The chain’s inherent cheap fees, high TPS, and fast transactions make LST use cases more applicable for many users as compared to Ethereum.
SolBlaze is now not just a top service provider on Solana, but actually a top LST provider in general, sitting at the 13th overall Liquid Staking spot by TVL according to DefiLlama. This can be considered impressive considering the headstart Ethereum has had relative to the Solana ecosystem, as well as the progression and popularity of restaking via EigenLayer, which has dramatically driven up demand for LSTs on Ethereum.
Background on SolBlaze
SolBlaze’s liquid staking solution (specifically dubbed BlazeStake) is a part of the greater SolBlaze ecosystem. While the protocol is most known for its liquid staking and native $BLZE token rewards, SolBlaze is comprised of multiple dedicated functions all serving Solana users, including;
$SOL faucet; first-ever faucet allowing users to claim small amounts of $SOL daily.
RPC Status Checker; first-ever uptime checker of top Solana RPC providers including GenesysGo, QuickNode, Ankr, Triton One, and Blockdaemon.
Sol Pay SDK; first-ever non-custodial Solana payments gate, including streams, which can act as a sort of subscription service enabler for crypto wallets
Token Minter; Users can launch their own SPL token with multiple customization features and metadata uploads.
With some expansive efforts in the Solana community, it seems that SolBlaze is definitely dedicated to the success of Solana on multiple fronts.
For the sake of this newsletter and as these are the most popular products offered by SolBlaze, we’ll be focusing on both BlazeStake and BlazeRewards.
BlazeStake
To use the BlazeStake platform, users simply deposit their $SOL to receive $bSOL. There is currently some 2.34M $bSOL in circulation, worth nearly $250M. At the time of writing, 1 $bSOL is equivalent to around 1.1 $SOL, or ~$107. Holders will see their stake increase at a current annual rate of ~8%, with 0.77% of this coming in the form of $BLZE rewards (more on this later). There are a couple of ways to unstake;
Instant Unstaking is dependent on available liquidity, so it is not always available, especially for users with size (otherwise everyone would always use this option).
Delayed Unstaking can be done at any time
Both forms of staking/ withdrawing incur a 0.1% fee, in addition to a 5% fee epoch fee. Proceeds of this staking rewards fee are broken down into the following;
Operations & Development: 50%
$BLZE Burns: 20%
$BLZE Liquidity: 20%
Treasury: 10%
There are a few reasons why someone may opt to use SolBlaze, beyond just the fact that it is one of the top choices for consumers looking to liquid stake $SOL. One is the fact that the protocol diversifies across the largest validator set on Solana, comprised of 270+ validators. This helps to ensure decentralization, which has been a past and recurring concern of Solana critics. Users may specify their stake pool delegations, if they wish to help decentralize the Solana network stake or simply to contribute to a particular validator.
BlazeRewards
Like many projects on Solana, SolBlaze has quickly realized the impact that incentives and rewards programs can have on users and has been quick to execute on this front. $bSOL holders are eligible to receive airdrops. Holders can exercise their voting power to play a role in what Solana projects received support from the SolBlaze treasury, which builds up over time by taking 10% of protocol staking fees. So far, users have been able to receive $BLZE tokens airdropped directly to their wallet on multiple occasions for simply holding $bSOL, or even using $bSOL in DeFi, which is even more productive.
BlazeRewards operates on a scoring system, the SolBlaze Score. This is somewhat akin to a points system, although it incentivizes outside uses of the protocol’s tokens ($bSOL and $BLZE) more than many such programs. The SolBlaze Score grants a 10% referral bonus to BlazeStake referrers.
$bSOL and $BLZE both also have a multitude of applications across most popular and applicable protocols under the Solana umbrella, including but not limited to Kamino, Solend, Orca, Meteora, Marginfi, LP Finance, and more.
BlazeStake also features a referral link, allowing referrers to receive a small amount of $bSOL (specifically, a 0.08% deposit fee), right in their wallet whenever someone stakes via their link.
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TLDR: SolBlaze is a popular protocol, building out an ecosystem atop Solana. BlazeStake provides one of the top Solana Liquid Staking experiences with lots of optionality and applications within DeFi. Most will know SolBlaze for these initiatives, but the teams efforts to promote the surrounding Solana ecosystem spread far beyond this.
If you enjoyed this, stay tuned as we will continue to cover liquid staking on Solana soon…
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