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Sanctum Monthly Update - September 2026

Last month, we:

Sanctum turns five

Sanctum turned five on 9th September!

This was our mainnet launch tweet back in 2021.

The half-life of crypto protocols is pretty short. Most of the protocols that started in 2021 are now defunct; I am grateful we're still here.

What explains our longevity? I'd say 80% luck and 20% not giving up. 2022-2023 were really really hard and we came extremely close to quitting. Thank God we didn't.

I'd like Sanctum to become our life’s work. If we continue to stay honest and humble, cultivate love and trust with our users, and build for long-term sustainable growth instead of playing short-term games, I believe that we can build something here that lasts for decades, hopefully a century.

12 consecutive quarters of TVL growth

In August, Sanctum became the largest protocol on Solana (by AUM, not by revenues), with over $2B in assets entrusted with us.

We continue to grow our TVL. As of Q3 2026, we have managed twelve consecutive quarters, or exactly four years, of TVL growth. TVL went from 16.8M SOL at the end of last quarter to 18.8M SOL now, a 12% QoQ increase.

Much thanks to our team for their hard work, partners for their support, and our users for their trust in us.

CLOUD -> SANC, 259M SANC burn, Sanctum Day

In August, we stopped protocol emissions by ending ASR once and for all. The remaining problems were a large token overhang (in the community reserve), and a lack of clear value accrual.

In September, we successfully renamed CLOUD to SANC and burned 259M SANC, over 25% of the total supply. And so, as of today we have:

✅ growing TVL and revenues ✅ no token-equity misalignment ✅ no more token overhang after 25% token burn ✅ healthy float and minimal new unlocks ✅ clear link between Sanctum and SANC token ticker

We also ran our inaugural Sanctum Day, a private event for SANC holders. We think of SANC holders not as faceless members of an ever-changing crowd, but rather as partners who have entrusted their funds to us for what may well turn out to be the remainder of their lives.

The last part people have been asking for is more clarity on token value accrual. But unfortunately this is the part where we can't do that yet for legal reasons. Overall, though, I'm happy with the good work we've done these few months, spearheaded by Donovan. We will continue to execute on the token.

Sanctum App 2.0

We launched Sanctum 2.0 last month at SANC NINE, our event at KBW!

(image here -- anyone have?)

Last month, I wrote:

we are doubling down on the basics: we'll make Sanctum App the safest place to hold and grow your SOL

This has become especially poignant in the wake of the Ledger supply chain compromises. The gold standard recommendation has traditionally been "use a Ledger", and now it's clear that that is not sufficient. As great as Ledgers are, they are still a single point of failure. We think the gold standard here is multi-signature wallets (or "multisig"), which is used every day among centralised exchanges and protocols like Sanctum to secure billions of dollars in value.

There is an enormous and timely demand for something truly safe. We're thus rolling out multisig to all Sanctum App users this month.

I want to shout out Squads' Fuse wallet, which was the first consumer multisig wallet on Solana. We love it and are unapologetically copying their amazing work. We aim to reach feature parity (security-wise) with Fuse by the end of the month and continue to improve from there.

I'm also really glad that Iarla and Diego have now officially joined the Sanctum team working on the Sanctum App! Iarla and Diego were cofounders at Pyra (a crypto neobank app), which unfortunately had to wind down after the Drift hack. We have similar visions, and they're hardworking and conscientious with great product instincts, so I'm really excited to work with them to take the Sanctum App to new heights.

Sanctum Wrapped SOL (swSOL)

Sanctum Wrapped SOL is a new Solana primitive that we've been building at Sanctum for almost a year now. We launched it for the first time this month!

(image here -- any suggestions?)

Not many know this, but native SOL is not a Solana Program library (SPL) token. And because it's not an SPL token you can't use it on-chain: in swaps, borrow-lend, or any DeFi for that matter. To get around this problem there is an SPL token called Wrapped SOL (wSOL), which wraps native SOL.

Wrapped SOL is kind of like a "stablecoin" backed by native SOL: wSOL is to native SOL what USDC is to USD. What we've managed to do with Sanctum Wrapped SOL (swSOL) is stake that underlying native SOL. You can think of it as the difference between a stablecoin backed by cash underneath your pillow, vs a stablecoin backed by TBills.

In most of DeFi most of that SOL is sitting idle (e.g. in liquidity pools that are out of range). With Sanctum Wrapped SOL we are able to give yields on all that idle SOL that sits on Solana today, be it on LPs, perp platforms with open interest, and even potentially on wallet balances.

It's a simple idea but there are quite a few challenges. The most important is that in order for this to be a drop-in replacement for wrapped SOL, it needs to be as optimised as possible (in transaction size, number of accounts, compute units etc.). It also needs to always be redeemable 1:1 to native SOL with no fees, so you need a very deep liquidity layer to service swSOL. Luckily we've spent the last few years at Sanctum building exactly that.

Sanctum wants to make all SOL liquid staked. This is a primitive which could unlock over $2B of wrapped SOL sitting idle today. Excited to finally get this out!