Hi Cloudies! 
The purpose of this research was for me to understand if incentives drive TVL growth and the best way for me to do this was to analyse the TVL and understand what the affects were, its fairly basic but enjoy.
What a wild ride, here we go!
Timeline:
Aug 17 2023 – March 23 2024
Sanctum launches on Aug17 with a reserve pool of 200k SOL and TVL does not oscillate much for 8 months
March 24 2024
2x increase in the span of a day, why?
There was a JUP discord call on the 22nd of March & the 24th this tweet x.com
By the team made its way around twitter showcasing that INF yield was 12% a year, no direct incentives caused this up tick only the realisation that stagnant SOL could be used for yield on SOL.
From this I think we can infer that education & exposure of Sanctum caused this increase, fair?
April is a month of continued growth; Sanctum teases Wonderland and we could argue the case that an uptick in TVL is due to ‘farmers’ trying to get exposure. Again, no direct incentives and TVL is increasing organically, mostly through exposure and users understanding LSTs further. TVL grows from 500k SOL to 2m SOL throughout this month so a 4x which is pretty insane considering there are no direct incentives (yet).
Now on the 29th of April, Wonderland is introduced!
3.9k likes & 14m impressions & 1.4m views on the video, so LOTS OF EXPOSURE.
We’re sitting at 2.27m SOL at the start of the month, now there are DIRECT incentives now. We have points, which although information has not fully disclosed its clear that a token is coming.
With the introduction of points, TVL does rapidly increase, and this is directly related to incentives. HOLD an LST, get points, points = allocation of token, simple.
Wonderland S1 lasts till the 5th of June TVL increases from 2.27m to 5.91m in this time, a 160% increase due to direct incentives. That’s a hefty increase, and does show that incentives drive TVL growth.
After June 5th we see a drop in SOL TVL, wonderland ends and you would think that people would mass exit & move on to farm something else, right?
No, TVL drops to 5.2m SOL at the lowest point through this period, which speaks volumes on the impact wonderland had on users understanding of LSTs, as they provide you with yield on your SOL they did not feel the need to exit their positions but rather kept them and earned that yield. So, a massive win, and does help the argument for another season imo.
It takes 106 days for TVL to break previous ATH in SOL
Its important to note that SOL price ranges between 125-186 during this period, there is a lot of uncertainty and the broader market is very unsure of what’s happening in regards to crypto due to the upcoming American elections and the risk of a Kamila presidency.
September the 21st is an important day,
Breakpoint conference for SOL & @soleconomist does their keynote speech talking about the future of Sanctum. This is direct exposure & not incentivised TVL growth that starts the uptick in TVL.
TVL peaked exactly a month later, at 7.56m SOL an increase 1.31m SOL which is incredible.
The growth through October primarily came from the LSTs of Bybit & Binance launching.
Interestingly Bybit had crazy incentives on BBsol at launch, and we can see that up until the 21st of October continued growth of up to 1.08m SOL occurred and during this time the overall TVL of sanctum increased by 1.06m SOL so their direct incentives did cause new SOL to enter sanctum. However, during this time Binance also launched their LST, they had 865k SOL on the 21st of October so its difficult to gauge just how much new SOL came from the incentives of Bybit. If this was an isolated launch then we could fully understand this better.
Bybit SOL
Binance SOL
Conclusion:
I think early on, education was key to driving TVL, the direct point incentives from wonderland helped boost TVL up dramatically and throughout this event Sanctum was talked about and due to the nature of the campaign through the puzzles it had a flywheel effect of creating a community which I loved to watch. The point incentives during wonderland directly correlated to an uptick of 3.64m SOL which is the single biggest increase in TVL from an ‘event’. Incentives DO increase TVL, fact.
Now the incentives of BBsol are hard to fully understand, but I do think they did contribute to at least some uptick in TVL, I wouldn’t be against the team using some CLOUD to incentivise a new LST for a fixed amount of time, especially if that LST had a good mission statement, like HealthSOL for example. The only consideration is that as soon these incentives are removed TVL either leaves or rotates to the best APY available, it does not hang around in a lower yielding product as you can see in the BBsol chart.
I would appreciate feedback on whether you agree with my analysis and if there are events I have missed that you think consider a mention.
Thanks 
, and this should spark meaningful discussions around Sanctum’s growth strategies!
.