Liquid Staking on Solana - Why are we doing what we’re doing?

It’s been more than a month now since we launched the devnet version of Marinade — liquid staking for Solana.

And the feedback has been amazing so far…

Source: Marinade.finance Discord, #feedback channel

As many people asked us what made us decide to work on liquid staking on Solana, it’s fair to touch on some core principles and areas we want to improve while building Marinade.

Decentralization

One of the main propositions of blockchain networks is being censorship resistant. That means no nation, corporation or another third-party has the power to control who can transact or store their value on the network.

In the Solana network there are more than 600 validators, but currently the top 16 validators have enough staking power to be able to halt the network — we found this to be a problem from a security perspective.

Marinade helps to combat this by delegating the stake across a huge list (think hundreds) of smaller but reliable validators and making the concentration of power more even. This should result in greatly increasing the number of validators with enough concentrated stake to halt the network.

Source: Solanabeach.io

Adoption

We believe that to onboard the next 1 billion people to crypto, the end-user experience must change and adapt to needs of more mainstream users.

While early adopters don’t care about writing down seeds and pin codes for multiple wallets, storing it around their house or burying it in the ground, we just can’t imagine a world this is still a standard after 5, 10, or 20 years in.

That’s why we put such an emphasis on having our solution well-designed, seamlessly working and potentially a pleasure to use — so that a friend can tell a friend staking is really that easy as clicking a button.

Staking SOL using Marinade.finance app

Interoperability

Do you know how they say 1+1 = 3 at times? This is exactly the case, if we connect the dots and make all different protocols in the Solana ecosystem work together.

With Marinade, you’ll be able to start staking or deposit existing stake account with one click and get back your tokenized stake account. It just takes another click to put this tokenized stake in action — add it as liquidity to AMM, deposit to lending protocol, borrow stablecoin against it…all while receiving staking rewards at the same time.

As a reference, there are more than 300-million SOL tokens locked in staking at this point. Talking numbers, if we were to unlock and make liquid 10 % of these staked assets, we’re looking at $1B TVL to put into the Solana DeFi world via Marinade ecosystem partners — if you like us to guide our users (and unlocked SOL tokens) to your protocol, visit our partnerships page.

Independence

No seed round. No private sale. No VC. We’re proud to be independent of any investor or validator group. This helped us to put all of our efforts into building the best foundation for our liquid staking service. In the long run, we plan to transform into DAO shaping all the next adventures for Marinade. But this is not the most important right now—getting all the ducks in a row before a mainnet launch is.

Getting all the ducks in a row before a mainnet launch.

See you on the other side — see you on mainnet.

One last thing, we’re looking for another kick-ass Rust developer to join our team and this exciting journey. If you’re interested, let us know on our Discord.

About Marinade Finance

Marinade.Finance is the first non-custodial liquid staking protocol built on Solana. Stake your SOL tokens with Marinade and receive mSOL (marinated SOL) tokens in return that can be used in decentralized finance (DeFi). mSOL is the most widely integrated collateralized version of SOL. The price of mSOL goes up relative to SOL each epoch, with rewards being accrued into the underlying staked SOL.

Marinade’s liquid staking stakes in 400+ validators that are selected automatically by an open-source, fair formula based on performance, commission, and decentralization.

Marinade includes mSOL->SOL swap, so you can “Unstake Now!” and receive your SOL immediately with a small fee. You can also directly exchange between mSOL and SOL on secondary markets at the current rate. Finally, you can unstake your SOL with zero fee by waiting 4–6 days for the Solana cool-down period (delayed unstake).