Native vs Liquid Staking on Solana

What native staking is

Native staking means you delegate SOL directly to a validator from your own wallet. The SOL sits in a stake account only you control, rewards land and compound automatically at the end of every epoch, and no smart contract sits between you and the protocol. The one constraint: to get the SOL back you deactivate the stake and wait out the remainder of the current epoch — 16 hours on average, 32 at the outside. New to it? Start with how to stake Solana.

Liquid staking and LSTs

Liquid staking routes your SOL through a stake pool. In return you receive a liquid staking token (LST), a standard SPL token that represents your share of the pool. The LST does not pay rewards directly. Its exchange rate against SOL drifts upward each epoch as the pool earns, so your yield shows up as the token becoming worth more SOL over time.

Because an LST is an ordinary token, you can hold it, swap it to SOL instantly, or put it to work as collateral and liquidity across Solana DeFi while it keeps earning. It remains the minority route, and a shrinking one: liquid staking holds 12.1% of all staked SOL, down from a peak of 15.7% in January 2026, and lower in each of the 7 months since.

You do not have to sell your stake to get in. The stake-pool program accepts an existing stake account directly and issues pool tokens against it, so a native position can become an LST with no deactivation and no wait, provided it is delegated to a validator the pool already stakes to. The reverse instruction hands you back a stake account rather than SOL, which then follows the ordinary native timetable.

Native vs liquid: side by side

The main Solana LSTs

If you go liquid, the token you hold matters. The leading LSTs differ in who issues them, how large and therefore how tradable they are, and whether you get any say in the validator behind them.

Seven-day averages from the daily series behind our liquid staking dashboard; the order is read from it rather than fixed.

An exchange-issued token is not liquid staking in the sense the rest of this page uses it: the SOL behind it is a claim on the exchange, so the custody argument for staking yourself does not survive the wrapper. Among tokens backed by a pool on chain, JitoSOL is the largest, and size is what makes a token widely accepted as DeFi collateral and cheap to leave. Smaller pools — JPool, The Vault and JagPool — are worth knowing for a different reason: they let you choose the validator behind your LST, Stake.Cake included.

Yield: what each actually earns

The base reward is identical for both routes, because both ultimately delegate to validators. Solana inflation pays staked SOL about 5.0% APY before commission, distributed each epoch in proportion to your stake. On top of that, MEV changes the picture:

• Native staking earns inflation plus whatever MEV your validator passes through. The pass-through is the operator's choice, so it varies from nothing to everything.
• Every major LST captures MEV, mSOL included: they route to validators in Jito's tip auction and restake the tips into the token each epoch. Comparisons that still sort LSTs into “MEV” and “non-MEV” are describing an earlier Solana.
• What actually differs is the pool's own fee, taken off the rewards before they reach the token, and which validators the pool delegates to.

Those are the mechanics. Here is what they came to over the last completed epoch:

Route	Validators earned	Pool fee	You keep
Native — median validator baseline	4.97%	—	4.97%
Stake.Cake our validator	5.65%	—	5.65%
JitoSOL Jito	4.91%	4.0%	4.71%
vSOL The Vault	4.86%	5.0%	4.62%
bSOL BlazeStake	4.76%	5.0%	4.52%
JupSOL Jupiter	4.66%	5.0%	4.43%
jagSOL JagPool	4.66%	5.0%	4.43%
JSOL JPool	4.75%	7.0%	4.42%
mSOL Marinade	5.06%	—	—

“Validators earned” is the yield each pool's validators actually produced. The pool fee is that pool's cut of the rewards, read live from its on-chain stake pool account. “You keep” is what is left for the token holder. Native rows carry no pool layer, so the two columns match; a validator's own commission is already reflected in what it earned. A dash means no fee could be read from the pool's own account, so no net figure is claimed — Marinade's pool is not an SPL stake pool, so it always sits there and its row shows gross only. Yield data via Trillium.

The routes sit closer together than their headline APYs suggest. Every pool above delegates to the same kind of validator, so what those validators earned spans just 0.40 percentage points. What separates the last column is the pool's own fee, running from 4.0% to 7.0% of your rewards. Best to worst among the liquid routes is 0.29 points, or 2.9 SOL a year on a 1,000 SOL position.

One number to disregard wherever you see it quoted: the network-wide average. Across all stake it sits at 3.79%, against the median validator's 4.97% — and no delegator receives it. 63 validators charge 100% commission and hold 23.9% of all staked SOL: exchanges and operators staking their own SOL, who keep the rewards because there is nobody else to pay. That stake is in every network average and in nobody's wallet. The median is the number to compare a route against, and the spread worth acting on is the one in the table above — wider than the gap between native and liquid.

One caveat keeps these numbers honest: they are what each route produced over a past epoch, not a promise about the next one. A validator's commission and reliability decide how much of the theoretical yield reaches you, and both can change after you delegate. To model your own numbers, use the Validator Profit Calculator.

What leaving early costs

This is the clearest practical split between the two. Native staking has one route out: deactivate, wait out the rest of the epoch, withdraw. No fee, no penalty. See how to unstake Solana for the steps.

An LST has two, and they cost different things. Redeeming through the pool returns native SOL at full value after the next epoch boundary — the same wait as native, and no spread. Swapping to SOL on a DEX settles in seconds, and what you give up is the difference between the market price and what the pool would have redeemed the token for.

Swap to SOL	100 SOL	10,000 SOL
JitoSOL	0.03% 2.2 days of yield	0.05% 3.6 days of yield
mSOL	0.14% 10.0 days of yield	0.22% 15.8 days of yield

How far below redemption value a swap of that size lands right now, and the same figure expressed as days of the network's own yield — the useful comparison, because the alternative is waiting at most 32 hours and redeeming at full value. Redemption rates read from each pool's account on chain; quotes from Jupiter.

So the instant exit is a fee for immediacy, not a loss of principal, and it grows with the size of the position and shrinks with the depth of the token's market. Aggregators such as Sanctum also swap one LST directly for another, which avoids paying this twice.

Using your LST in DeFi

The reason to accept the extra risk of an LST is capital efficiency: the same SOL earns staking yield and stays productive elsewhere. Common uses:

• Collateral for borrowing on lending markets like Kamino, MarginFi, Drift and Save, so you can borrow against staked SOL without unstaking.
• Liquidity provision in LST/SOL pools to earn trading fees on top of staking yield.
• Looping (borrow, restake, repeat) to amplify yield, which also amplifies risk; treat it as advanced, not a starting move.

Native stake cannot do any of this. If your SOL is just sitting and compounding, that simplicity is a feature, not a limitation.

Taxes: a quick note

The two routes can be taxed differently. Native rewards arrive as new SOL each epoch, which many jurisdictions treat as income on receipt. Most LSTs accrue value through a rising exchange rate rather than new tokens, which can defer recognition until you sell or redeem, similar to an appreciating asset. This is a genuine difference, not tax advice; rules vary by country and change, so confirm with a professional for your situation.

Risks to understand

• Smart-contract risk (liquid only). An LST depends on the pool's code. The major pools run the widely deployed, audited SPL stake-pool program and have no holder-loss history, which lowers but never removes this risk. Worth knowing: withdrawal is an instruction on that program, not a feature of a website, so a pool whose front end disappears is still redeemable by anything that can send the transaction.
• The discount on exit (liquid only). An LST's redemption value only rises, but its market price can sit below it — that is what the table above measures, and it widens when many holders want out at once. Redeeming through the pool still returns full value, so the discount costs you only if you must sell now: in a panic, or when the token is posted as collateral and a deeper discount triggers a liquidation.
• Leverage risk (liquid only). Looping and lending stack extra layers; each added protocol is one more thing that can break. Keep early positions simple.
• Validator performance (both). A validator with downtime or a high skip rate produces fewer rewards to share. This is why choosing a good validator matters in either model.
• Slashing. Solana does not currently slash stake for ordinary downtime, so the practical downside is reduced rewards rather than loss of principal.

Which should you choose?

Choose native if you hold SOL for the medium to long term, want the simplest non-custodial setup, and value automatic compounding with no contract layer and no discount to pay on the way out.

Choose liquid if you want your staked SOL to stay productive, as DeFi collateral or liquidity, or if you might need to exit in seconds rather than wait out an epoch. Which token depends on what you will do with it, but the exit table above is the part most comparisons skip.