Solana liquid staking startup Sanctum trials ‘creator coins’

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This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. 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…