Inside Solana’s Staking Giants and the Mystery Whales With Billions

Key Takeaways

At $101 to $102 per SOL, those positions quickly turn into billion-dollar piles of solana. In other words, while traders watch solana’s price bounce around the triple-digit mark, some of the network’s biggest players have fortunes riding on the machinery underneath it.

Coinbase Sits on a $2.45 Billion SOL Staking Mountain

At press time, solana (SOL) is changing hands at $101.75 per coin, ranking seventh by market capitalization with a valuation of $59.98 billion. Unlike bitcoin (BTC), solana (SOL) does not have a straightforward, official rich list cataloging the network’s largest SOL holders, and staking makes following the money considerably trickier.

Wallets can hold SOL outright while simultaneously committing a great deal of it to staking. That makes staking data one of the clearest windows into where some of the network’s largest concentrations of SOL actually sit.

According to Stakingintel.live statistics, Coinbase ranks as Solana’s largest SOL staker, commanding a hefty 24 million SOL. At current prices, that position is worth roughly $2.45 billion, representing about 2.33% of the $105 billion in aggregate assets Arkham Intelligence estimates Coinbase holds.

Top five solana (SOL) stakers percentages via stakingintel.live data.

Interestingly, even $2.45 billion in SOL looks relatively modest when stacked against Coinbase’s bitcoin holdings. At the time of writing, approximately $74.81 billion of the wealth held by Coinbase is made up of bitcoin.

Right behind Coinbase is the Solana Foundation’s staking withdraw authority with 23,714,063 SOL, worth approximately $2.42 billion. This one is different from a conventional whale wallet because a withdraw authority is essentially a control key: SOL can be scattered across hundreds of separate stake accounts while one authority retains the power to withdraw those funds.

Binance and Jito Put Billions More SOL to Work

In third place is the Binance BNSOL Pool, commanding around 10,390,491 SOL valued at just over $1 billion. The pool is essentially a liquid staking service where users deposit SOL and receive BNSOL tokens in return, allowing them to keep their assets staked while trading the resulting tokens or putting them to work across decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.

Once again, $1 billion sounds enormous until the wider balance sheet enters the picture. The position is peanuts compared with Binance’s roughly $165 billion cache of onchain assets of which most is valued in BTC.

Another liquid staking operation claims fourth place, with Jito’s pool holding 10,272,500 SOL, or roughly $1.05 billion at current prices. The Jito Stake Pool works along similar lines: depositing native SOL mints JitoSOL, a liquid staking token (LST) representing the assets committed to staking.

Then things get considerably more mysterious.

Four Unknown Whales Have $2.1 Billion Riding on SOL

Figment Staking and Custody takes fifth place with 8,584,187 SOL, a position worth roughly $876 million. After Figment, however, recognizable names start disappearing from the leaderboard. An unidentified whale occupies sixth place with 5,617,500 SOL, currently worth about $573 million. Jupiter’s JupSOL Pool interrupts the mystery at No. 7, holding 5,171,110 SOL worth approximately $527 million.

Then comes a curious cluster.

Top #6-10 solana (SOL) stakers percentages via stakingintel.live data screenshot. — Top #6-10 solana (SOL) stakers percentages via stakingintel.live data.

The eighth-, ninth-, and 10th-largest positions are all labeled unknown whales, and each controls almost exactly 5 million SOL. Their respective positions stand at 5,003,404 SOL, 5,002,415 SOL, and 5,002,390 SOL, putting each stash at roughly $510 million.

Put them together with the unidentified whale in sixth place, and four unnamed entities control more than 20.6 million staked SOL worth approximately $2.1 billion.

That is where the Solana network’s staking leaderboard stops looking like a routine list of validators and starts getting interesting. Coinbase, the Solana Foundation, Binance, Jito and Figment put recognizable names on billions of dollars in staked SOL. But lurking among them are four anonymous heavyweights with another $2.1 billion on the line, a reminder that even when the blockchain is public, the people behind some of its largest fortunes can remain anyone’s guess.