Bitget launched BGSOL on October 22, 2024, and introduced a one-month wealth management activity in the platform’s wealth management section. The BGSOL yield can reach a maximum annualized return of 30%.
According to market news, in October 2024, top trading platforms such as Binance, Bybit, and Bitget announced the launch of their own SOL liquidity staking tokens, entering the Solana liquidity staking track. It seems that influenced by the release of liquidity staking tokens such as BNSOL and BGSOL, the price of SOL has risen from $135 in early October to over $170. This seems to be a signal, which raises the question: why did these top trading platforms choose to lay out this track at the current stage, and what opportunities can the liquidity staking solutions they launched bring to ordinary investors?
Liquidity staking provides new opportunities for Solana
Liquidity staking is a narrative that has emerged in the crypto asset industry in the past two years. It allows users to re-stake assets that have already been staked for other blockchain networks or DApps. Liquidity staking assets can meet the practical needs of Active Validation Services (AVS) and expand the security of the original chain based on the PoS system to more ecological applications.
Platforms or DApps that provide liquidity staking assets will allocate part of their revenue or airdrop rewards to participants in liquidity staking. Liquidity staking actually improves the security and activity of the network and promotes the prosperity of the ecological economy. It can be seen that liquidity staking is already a complete system with a clear supply-demand market. Participating in liquidity staking not only contributes to the crypto ecosystem but also increases the opportunity for participants to earn more profits.
In the past year, Solana has quickly gathered a large number of technical resources and user base with its technological advantages and the hot meme market, and has become one of the most eye-catching public chain projects. Solana’s ecosystem is also rapidly improving, including wallets, DeFi infrastructure, NFT, and various DApps applications, and so on.
According to SOLSCAN data, the market value of SOL staking in October 2024 has reached $65.7 billion, accounting for 67% of the total market value of SOL. Faced with such a market worth billions of dollars, the liquidity staking sector has naturally become the focus of Solana’s ecological development at this stage.
Top trading platforms launch SOL liquidity staking solutions
BGSOL (Bitget), bbSOL (Bybit), and BNSOL (Binance) are all liquidity staking tokens that essentially are liquidity staking solutions launched by exchanges in cooperation with decentralized staking protocol service providers, with no major differences in underlying mechanisms. Since Bitget recently announced the launch of BGSOL, let’s take BGSOL as an example to mainly introduce the underlying principles and participation methods of such liquidity staking services.
BGSOL is a liquidity staking token and also a more flexible liquidity staking solution launched by Bitget in cooperation with Solayer. Users can obtain BGSOL on the platform through staking SOL or direct purchase of trading pairs.
Participants need to note that the exchange ratio between BGSOL and SOL is not 1:1. The reason is that the underlying value of BGSOL includes two parts: SOL and the basic rewards continuously obtained by staking SOL on the chain (currently with an annualized yield of about 8%). For example, if a user originally staked 10 SOL and exchanged it for 9.725 BGSOL, after 1 month, the user can exchange the BGSOL back into approximately 10.06 SOL, and the excess part is the accumulated rewards obtained on the chain.
As mentioned earlier, the biggest advantage of this type of liquidity staking token is that it can not only obtain basic on-chain rewards but also receive additional rewards through re-staking. Bitget launched BGSOL on October 22, 2024, and introduced a one-month wealth management activity in the platform’s wealth management section. The annualized yield after stacking can reach 30%.
Interest rate statistics of various platforms as of October 24, 2024:
Although the liquidity staking tokens of major platforms have good returns, Bitget is undoubtedly the investment category with the highest interest rate currently on the market.
Some users may also consider other factors, such as asset security or future application scenarios of liquidity staking tokens. In terms of security, Solayer must be mentioned. Solayer is one of the top projects in the Solana staking sector, not only has rich development experience but also focuses on maximizing staking income, including native SOL staking, MEV-boost, and AVS income, etc. Top trading platforms such as Bitget, Binance, and Bybit cooperate with Solayer to build the first line of security for SOL staking.
Different from Solana staking service providers such as Solayer, Jito, and Cambrian, top exchanges provide users with a second guarantee of funds based on the importance attached to their brand image. Just a while ago, after the abnormal price fluctuation of BGB, Bitget fully compensated all affected users within 72 hours, bringing a sense of security to the users.
In terms of application scenarios, there is currently no significant difference among the liquidity staking tokens of major trading platforms. However, according to on-chain data, on October 22, a whale address staked 6,653.9 SOL (worth about $1.1 million) for BGSOL. Moreover, according to Solayer’s webpage data, the current staking amount of BGSOL has exceeded $18 million, far surpassing BNSOL and bbSOL.
Data source: https://app.solayer.org/dashboard
Based on comprehensive comparison, it seems that the “smart money” in the market has made their choice.
The expected returns from Solana staking may be far beyond this
The biggest charm of the crypto world lies in unexpected encounters with wealth, just as ETH ecosystem applications or protocols have given early participants various airdrop rewards. Solana’s ecosystem still has a considerable gap compared to the vast ETH ecosystem, but with the current development speed of the Solana ecosystem, there will soon be a large number of emerging ecological projects, bringing more potential opportunities.
The layout of top trading platforms in the Solana staking track will undoubtedly bring new vitality to the entire ecosystem and also bring more application scenarios for their own SOL liquidity staking tokens based on their resource advantages. At that time, investors can flexibly convert BGSOL into other liquidity tokens according to their needs and invest in more attractive application scenarios.