Table of Contents
BitGo and Jupiter said on October 28 that eligible institutional clients of BitGo Bank & Trust can now stake SOL directly from their existing custody accounts through a "Jupiter x BitGo validator." Jupiter, the Solana-based decentralized finance platform, operates the validator independently, and BitGo says it does not control the validator's performance.
Under the arrangement, clients delegate SOL to the validator from their BitGo accounts rather than sending it to an outside staking provider. The companies say the staked SOL stays delegated and is not transferred to Jupiter's custody. Rewards come from Solana's native staking mechanism, vary with network conditions and validator performance, and are not guaranteed. Unstaking is subject to Solana's protocol-level deactivation period.
BitGo describes the custody side as cold storage with access to up to $250 million of insurance, subject to the policy's terms, conditions and exclusions, plus bankruptcy-remote protections. It also says the BitGo entity serving a client depends on the client's jurisdiction and eligibility.
Abel Seow, BitGo's managing director and head of APAC sales, said staking "needs to fit into their existing custody and approval processes."
Kash Dhanda, Jupiter's chief operating officer, said running a validator is how Jupiter invests in the base layer beneath its swaps, perpetuals and lending products.
For scale, Solana Compass data for the validator it tracks under Jupiter's name showed about 9.72 million SOL of activated stake on October 28, roughly 2.24% of the network and fifth among 661 validators. The announcement does not say whether that is the validator BitGo clients will use.
BitGo already offered SOL staking, so Jupiter adds a validator option rather than a new product. This announcement follows BitGo's October 7 launch of Lido ETH staking for eligible US clients and its custody role for Grayscale's Hyperliquid staking ETF. In June, we reported that BitGo was turning its bank charter into a DeFi yield gateway through vault partnerships with Morpho and Concrete, and in August that it moved $7.7 billion of WBTC to Chainlink's cross-chain protocol.
Custodians are increasingly bundling complementary services like staking into their platforms. Blockhead covered BNY adding staking to its custody platform through Galaxy in August, and Interactive Brokers added Ethereum staking through Zerohash this month. On the product side, the staked Solana ETFs have put the feature in front of allocators: Blockhead reported that Bitwise's Solana staking ETF launched with $72 million in second-day volume, and that Morgan Stanley entered staking ETPs in July with a fee-focused pitch.
