Demand for liquid staking has surged by 91% in the Solana ecosystem, with protocols like Marinade Finance, Lido, Jito, JPool, and Socean holding $187 million in staked SOL tokens by the end of June. This comprises most of the $270 million currently locked in Solana's DeFi ecosystem. However, Ethereum remains the king of DeFi with $26 billion out of $44 billion locked across the industry.

Staking provides security for a proof of stake blockchain and stakers are rewarded for their lockup with more crypto over time. Liquid staking services remove the technical headache of running a personal node and provide users with tokens that are redeemable 1:1 with the tokens being staked.