Liquid staking tokens and the zakat on yield
Rulings · 30 Jun 2026 · 2 min read
Liquid staking tokens and the zakat on yield
Staked SOL comes back to you as a token whose price quietly grows. That design decides how the yield is counted — and why there is no separate rewards line in your report.
Stake SOL through a liquid staking protocol and you receive an LST: a token representing your share of a stake pool. You keep something liquid and transferable while the SOL underneath keeps validating.
The yield is already in the price
Most LSTs do not pay rewards to you. Rewards accrue to the pool, and each token becomes redeemable for slightly more SOL than it was yesterday. Your balance never changes; the redemption rate does. So when the scan prices the token at market, the accumulated yield is already inside that number.
That is why the report shows no separate staking rewards line. Adding one would count the same growth twice.
Does the lock-up defer anything?
No. Native unstaking waits for the end of an epoch, and pool withdrawals can queue. Neither takes the wealth out of your hands: it is yours, it is measurable, and a delay in reaching it is not the same as not owning it. The classical parallel is a debt you are confident of collecting — it counts.
Where scholars differ
Some treat staking yield as income, due when received rather than folded into a year-end valuation. In practice the two approaches converge for anyone holding across a full hawl, and diverge for someone who stakes and exits inside one. If you move in and out often, this is worth asking about specifically.