Tramplin vs LSTs: what's the difference and which one is right for you?

Cat In Chief

• 2 min read
Tramplin vs LSTs: what's the difference and which one is right for you?

If you've spent any time in the Solana ecosystem, you've probably come across liquid staking tokens, like mSOL, jitoSOL, bSOL.

By this point, probably you've been wondering how they compare to staking with Tramplin.

First, what is a liquid staking token?

When you stake SOL natively, your tokens are delegated to a validator. They stay in your wallet, but they're not liquid, you can't use them elsewhere while staked.

LSTs (Liquid Staking Tokens) solve that problem. When you stake through a liquid staking protocol, you receive a token in return, mSOL, jitoSOL, or similar, that represents your staked position.

That token is tradeable, usable as collateral, and deployable in DeFi strategies. Your SOL essentially works two jobs at once.

For power users who want to put their SOL to work across lending protocols and liquidity pools, LSTs make a lot of sense.

So what's the trade off?

In simple terms, LSTs rely on smart contracts to hold and manage pooled funds. And some smart contracts have historically been the most common point of failure in crypto.

Over $3.4 billion was lost to smart contract exploits in 2025 alone. That's not a reason to avoid DeFi entirely, but it's something worth keeping in mind.

There's also depegging risk. LSTs are designed to stay near the value of SOL, but they're still separate tokens. In volatile or illiquid market conditions, that peg can slip.

And finally, it's simply complexity. To get the most out of an LST, you need to actively manage where it's deployed, monitor positions, and understand the protocols you're interacting with.

Where Tramplin fits?

Tramplin takes a different approach entirely.When you stake with Tramplin, your SOL is delegated natively to our validator, what changes is how rewards are distributed.

Instead of every staker receiving a small, predictable reward each epoch, rewards pool together and redistribute through a randomized model.

Every 10 minutes, one staker receives a small reward. Once a month, one staker wins a significantly larger one, just like CQJu...XQAV took home 106 SOL yesterday!

>The result? Average APR of 54% across Tramplin stakers, with a median of 30%. Compared to the ~7-9% you'd earn through a standard LST.

The honest comparison

Here's where each one makes sense:

LSTs are the right choice if you're an active DeFi user who wants to put your SOL to work across multiple protocols simultaneously. The extra yield from DeFi strategies can be meaningful and the composability is genuinely useful if you know how to use it.
Tramplin is the right choice if you want higher expected returns on your staked SOL without taking on extra protocol risk.

For most retail SOL holders, people staking between 1 and 100 SOL who want real returns without complexity — Tramplin just make sense.Try it today: https://tramplin.io/