Roadmap Update August 2024
See Roadmap Update July 2024 for last month’s update.
What’s new this month?
CEX LSTs
As I’m sure you have heard, a few CEXes have started announcing that they are launching their LSTs on Solana!
This is a super big deal as millions of new users will be able to easily own a piece of – and play their part in securing – one of the greatest and most performant decentralised networks. This is a big win for all of us. Additionally, CEXes are adopting open-source, decentralised, community-owned SPL stake pool programs instead of building their own gated solutions. This means that they will be able to leverage all of Sanctum and all of DeFi from day 1. Again, a massive win.
This was many months of work behind the scenes that we couldn’t really talk about (still) since we are under NDAs.
While we have spoken with all the CEXes, we worked very closely with Bybit in particular to build some bespoke infrastructure for them. It wasn’t all smooth-sailing: working with the CEXes requires a new level of professionalism and has taught us to improve our documentation and processes. We’re experimenting with certain things to make new LST launches better and more seamless, which you should hopefully observe soon.
Sanctum 2.0
In last month’s report I mentioned that we were working on certain “zero to one” concepts: “radically reimagining the scope of what liquid staking can be, and radically transforming what crypto will look like in the process.”
The overarching vision for Sanctum is to make people wealthier, happier, and more fulfilled. A big part of this is to give people compelling reasons to hold, grow, and spend their wealth. Crypto is pretty good at the “growing wealth” part, but not so good at the holding or the spending: the moment you actually want to spend your money you offramp it.
Sanctum 2.0 is our experiment to solve this. These are just renders for now, very early-stage, but hopefully this gives some idea of what we’re thinking:
Sanctum Research
Our goal for Sanctum Research is to make it the knowledge base for anything LST- or Sanctum- related. If Discord is the water cooler, Sanctum Research is the town bulletin.
Over the past months, Sanctum Research has really exploded! You guys have really made it incredible. I want to thank @Halfa for kicking off the Sanctum Research “gentleman’s pot” and everyone for contributing to it. And we have had so many awesome proposals, comments and activity. @Bengshark, @GreythornAM, @Begrime800, @JohnnyTheClown, @MikeAF, @DanikaHollandaise, @Asimsy, @fairysquid, @luciotamino are all super active and beloved members who have been making this place awesome. I would love to integrate $CLOUD into this place somehow.
We’ve started to ask new and existing projects to create posts for their LSTs, and that’s been awesome as well. Sanctum Research should eventually be the canonical “encyclopedia” for each LST entry, for people to learn more about it.
What would you guys like to see more of in Sanctum Research? What would take it to the next level? Let me know!
Other smaller changes
- Dark mode was supposed to take one week, but we took the opportunity to completely overhaul our design system. This took a lot of work, but means that new Sanctum components will be a lot quicker and easier to build, improving our ship speed
- We started working with DRiP creators to start thinking about what we could build to make personal LSTs as useful to them as possible.
- We are talking to a few community members to set up some sort of microgrants program. We are looking to bring a community member on with one and only one mandate: figure out how to get community right.
Sanctum Community Wins
I want to take some time to spotlight wins in the Sanctum community, or stuff that I personally find cool! Note that nothing here should be thought of as official endorsements or financial advice of any sort. If there’s anything you’d like to share with me, please reach out to me any time 
Pathfinders
One of our partner projects, Pathfinders, recently wrapped up their NFT mint! It was a big success. Congratulations to them.
These mints are powered by Sanctum’s LSTs underneath the hood: they’re the world’s first LST-NFTs. They let users mint an NFT by locking 2 pathSOL up front, and they can unlock it any time to get their 2 pathSOL back. This is a much less exploitative model than the traditional NFT model.
I wrote a post about why I think Pathfinders are cool, and why they could potentially completely change the NFT meta here. 7,000+ LST-NFTs now exist in the Solana ecosystem: that’s over 14,000 SOL locked in this new meta. I hope they continue to ship a product we can all be proud of.
Windfall
This is a very early stage project, but I thought this proposal by the Windfall team was very cute! I love the graphics! Bonksie is looking extra cute here:
What’s next?
We have a VERY long engineering backlog. We’re working on SDKs, user dashboards, improved site UX, landing page, API improvements, Sanctum 2.0, bbSOL, wifSOL and flojoSOL bespoke support, INF improvements and program upgrades, etc…
Also, we are hiring! Public post here.
The immediate next step is to prepare for Breakpoint where we can’t wait to meet all of you. Sanctum is hosting the Breakpoint closing party BTW. The entire team will be there and there is one announcement we can’t wait to share with you
And one last thing…
This is why we do what we do. 
See you at Breakpoint!
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