Marinade Kitchen Stories - June 2022
June has been a packed month for the Marinade team! Get all the updates and news that you might have missed this month in the Marinade Kitchen Stories!
Greetings everyone, or should we say, greetings, Chefs? Yes, that’s right! If you’re holding a Chef NFT, you are now officially, in the eyes of the DAO, a Chef! The role change was part of our recent community news that brought on Data, Marinade’s new Community Manager and updated roles and channels to the Discord server.
The point being, as we continue to work to decentralize Marinade itself, Chef NFT holders continue growing in importance when compared to the core contributors to Marinade.
Besides the community shuffling, it was a very exciting month for the team that also included a lot of travel thanks to Hacker Houses around the world as well as the team’s first ever retreat!
And despite the choppy market continuing for crypto, Marinade did enjoy some breakthroughs in June, from additional ecosystem integrations, to a nice spike in mSOL minting in June, bringing the current total on the market to over 7 million!
Come into the kitchen and let’s dig in!
Validators and Liquidity Mining gauges are LIVE!
There is more big news regarding Marinade’s community gauges. But first, a reminder of how it began:
You may recall validators gauges were released to the public in the middle of May and began impacting Marinade’s delegation strategy a few days later. Since then, almost 11M locked MNDE have been put to use in the gauges, allowing MNDE holders to directly control more than 700k SOL staked.
Marinade is proud of this new product, giving an extremely valuable utility to the MNDE token and enabling some validators to bootstrap themselves through the use of their MNDE investment. If you haven’t seen the gauges yet, we invite you to visit Tribeca or Marinade’s documentation page to learn more.
Curious how impactful the gauges can be for receiving SOL stake to a validator? Check out the calculator created by Ben, from CogentCrypto, that will allow you to understand even better how the different parameters of the gauges can affect a validator.
Following the Validators gauges, a discussion was opened on the forum to implement a new type of gauges in Marinade: the Liquidity Mining Gauges. As you may know, by using mSOL in the DeFi ecosystem, you can currently earn MNDE incentives in a lot of pools and projects. Those MNDE incentives were distributed by the Marinade team, with the objective of strategically allocate MNDE to attract liquidity where it was needed.
As mSOL is now well-known in the DeFi ecosystem, and as those incentives were still representing a centralized control over a part of Marinade, Marinade and its community voted on-chain to transfer this responsibility to the DAO. The results of this vote showed tremendous support of this proposal, with more than 99% of the voters in support of this evolution.
After just a couple weeks of development, the Master Chefs are pleased to report the Liquidity Mining gauges are officially LIVE! Get your Chef NFTs and begin delegating to the pools and protocols of your choice here. Check out this thread for how it works:
Moving liquidity mining to Gauges also make the incentives more reactive to the market, as users who quit some pools or protocols will also be able to change their vote, which will affect the rewards received over the next week. Previously, liquidity mining incentives were distributed for 2 weeks, without any possibility to re-modify them in case it would be needed.
Marinade expects these mining changes to bring nimbleness and a decentralized and community approach to the liquidity mining incentives, and everyone in the kitchen is excited to see how it will play out!
Want to discuss strategy or learn more? A public channel is available in the Marinade Discord where MNDE holders and communities from other protocols can come and discuss how they should approach the gauges as a community. Visit #Liquidity-Gauges.
June Travels to Perugia and Hacker Houses
June has also been a month of traveling for the Chefs!
At the end of May and in the beginning of June, most of the Marinade contributors gathered in Perugia, Italy, to meet each others as well as some partners, and to work from a same place and bond as a team.
We can say that this experiment was a success, with most of the Chefs already missing this moment and hoping that it will happen again.
Working from a same place, being able to have discussions around a barbecue or a glass of wine, helped without a doubt the Marinade to strenghten its bonds. During this retreat, contributors have been able to bring up a lot of topics regarding the future of Marinade, its internal organization, the approach to have regarding the work in front of us on Solana, and I can tell you that a lot came out of it.
During the last week of this retreat, Marinade also had the chance to welcome validators (like Ben from Cogent, or Jonny from SolanaCompass) but also partners (like Hubble or Flipside) and even members from the community (like Ciccio and Massimiliano, welcoming us on their Italian ground).
This retreat was an extremely good opportunity to work, reflect and plan for the future. Marinade contributors came back more motivated than ever to make Solana the best blockchain that we can all imagine.
Following this Italian trip, two Hacker Houses took place in Europe, London & Barcelona!
Some Marinade contributors were present at both, meeting with the Solana ecosystem, attending the presentations and keeping an eye on what is being built on Solana. If there’s one thing that we observed, it’s that devs are doing something! We can for example mention the presentation of Trdelnik, the project that won the Marinade grant during the Riptide Hackaton a few months back, that introduced their project to the world at the Barcelona Hacker House!
If you want to learn more about the projects that presented during those Hacker Houses, the best place to follow what happened is probably on the dedicated Twitter account!
Marinade even gave a presentation at the London Hacker House on liquid staking, will you spot the Chef in the video below?
Introducing Marinade Ambassadors!
If you’ve spent much time on Twitter you have likely noticed Marinade receiving a lot of attention in June! That is due in part to a new ambassador program that introduced its first two participants!
What are Ambassadors? The master Chefs have been looking for thought leaders in the Solana and crypto space to help tell Marinade’s story. We noticed that both Gaius and Knoxtrades were avid Solana enthusiasts and approach the space with an educational and welcoming tone. As we spoke more with them we were pleased to hear they were believers in Marinade’s mission and they agreed to become our first ambassadors!
Both have great Twitter followings but they differ in that Gaius runs The Library, an educational resource about Solana NFTs, DeFi and more ecosystem updates. Meanwhile, Knoxtrades has a YouTube channel and a technical background that includes most recently setting up a Solana Validator. Both are skilled educators and Solana ecosystem experts.
We are already noticing engagement spikes thanks to their work in the first month. Stay tuned to hear more from them, from special events to articles, threads and videos!
Marinade DAO Financial Overview — June 2022
Marinade DAO Financial Overview — June 2022
The month of June has been an important month for Marinade with the execution of the Token Exchange Program (TEP). Following an on-chain vote, the community accepted to exchange a chunk of MNDE tokens from the treasury to ecosystem builders and validators. The details of the participants can be found on the Forum, but let’s recap what was exchanged here:
Protocols
Solend: 500k SLND for 5M MNDE — Executed
Raydium: 100k USDC for 1M MNDE — Executed
Friktion: 10k USDC for 100k MNDE — Not executed yet
Port: 5k USDC for 50k MNDE — Executed
Crema: 5k USDC for 50k MNDE — Executed
Validators
Staking Facilities: 250k USDC for 2.5M MNDE — Executed (also 1M SOL stake for an additional 1.2M MNDE on 06/2023)
Shinobi Systems: 36k USDC for 360k MNDE — Executed
Cogent Crypto: 2.5K USDC for 25k MNDE — Executed
Laine, Stakewiz.com: 5k USDC for 50k MNDE — Executed
Blockdaemon: 50k USDC for 500k MNDE — Not executed yet
Stakin: 15k USDC for 150k MNDE — Executed
SolanaCompass: 5k USDC for 50k MNDE — Executed
This TEP will allow Marinade to exchange a total of 9.835M MNDE for 483k USDC and 500k SLND. An additional 1.2M MNDE will be distributed in exchange for 1M SOL staked to Marinade for at least a year.
Now let’s move to the financial overview following this TEP.
The expenses for Marinade during the month of June were $183,213 in USDC and 234,514 MNDE, with a revenue of 431 mSOL (or $17,585 in USDC), coming from the immediate unstake fees only. The rest of the money to pay contributors will come from the USDC received during the TEP (approximately 160k USDC), and MNDE that was already in the operational wallet (234,514 MNDE). No MNDE were used from the treasury this month to pay for contributions.
In addition to this, 3,840,000 MNDE were distributed as Liquidity Mining incentives, 8,339,999 MNDE as NFTs for the team allocations, and 8,900,000 MNDE have been exchanged as part of the Token Exchange Program.
As you can see, reducing the fees to 0% has a huge impact on the revenue flow of Marinade, and in order to be solvent for the next year of building, a proposal on the forum may appear in July to revisit the compensation plan previously instated.
Marinade Integrations across Crypto
Projects across crypto continue to integrate Marinade. The big news was Jupiter’s installment of the Marinade SDK for direct mSOL staking in their swaps. This means that for every SOL-mSOL swap, if staking through Marinade is the best route, Jupiter will automatically create new mSOL and use the Marinade SDK to do so, reducing the slippage and the fees from using a DEX pool, which is especially valuable for large swaps. Read more about the integration in Jupiter’s thread here:
Avana Wallet, a relatively new wallet coming out of beta, announced one of its first integrations is mSOL liquid staking! Thanks to the Avana team for making it easy for its growing user-base to help Solana decentralization. Read more about Avana and Marinade in their news release.
Content expansion at Marinade.Finance!
If you’ve been by Marinade.Finance lately you are likely beginning to notice a lot of updates and additions. That’s because the team is continuing to add more pages to the site to help boost SEO and keep more content close to the core Marinade App. This includes informational pages regarding the Chef NFTs, MNDE, DAO governance and even our own blog! The Master Chefs will continue to publish blogs on Medium to accommodate our email subscribers, but you will be able to find the same content on the Marinade site itself.
Also, keep an eye on the website for the publishing of The Cookbook, an educational resource that explains all the ways you can use mSOL in DeFi. The design team has also been busy collaborating with the communications team to create more and more infographics that help explain the value proposition of liquid staking mSOL. Keep an eye out for them across social media and be sure to share them!
Marinade reorganization
Another important event that marked the month of June for Marinade is the deep reorganization that the contributors team has started going through.
In less than a year, Marinade evolved from a bootstrapped project participating to a Hackathon to the biggest TVL on Solana. This is in itself a huge achievement, that came with a need to grow fast, in an already fast-paced ecosystem. This led to onboarding a lot of talents, trying to keep up with the pace.
With the recent market conditions, Marinade has to prepare for a potential long bear market without stopping to build and ship public goods products for the Solana ecosystem. In order to achieve this goal, Marinade decided to restructure its internal organization, with a focus on keeping full-time contributors that will help Marinade advance to the next DeFi cycle and help with the new challenges ahead of Solana and blockchain in general.
For these reasons, all the previous workgroups in which contributors were split will disappear in the next weeks, to let place to two unified groups: Growth & Build. The Growth workgroup will focus on planning and evaluating how to go forward with Marinade, whereas the Build workgroup will be working on developing and creating the products that Marinade hopes you’ll all want to use. This restructuring should facilitate internal communications and develop a nimble team that can act swiftly to the different market events and priorities.
As part of this reorganization, a few contributors will be leaving the team to focus on new adventures. Marinade wants to publicly thank Nbdy, who has worked on Partnerships and helped grow Marinade in both the DeFi and NFT worlds, Empty, who took good care of all contributors at his HR position, Kokon and his focus on financial planning and operations, Keisuke and his backend development skills and Lowmilla that focused on user research and design. They leave the Marinade team having learned a lot, but also taught a lot, and will stay around and hope that Marinade keeps growing.
This restructuring won’t change much for you, Marinade’s users, but you can expect Marinade to keep striving for the top and do what is needed for success. As transparency is one of the core values that Marinade stands for, it felt important to explain the internal changes that the team is going through.
That said, we would like to extend a welcome to a new Chef. Marinade has brought on a summer intern, Karolina, who will help with user testing, content recommendations and social media! Welcome, Karolina!
Looking forward to the second half of 2022
It’s incredible to think that six months have already passed in 2022! So much has been accomplished but there is also much more to do in order to help achieve our goals. Solana’s Nakamoto Coefficient continues to rise, now at 27, but more liquid staking adoption is still needed. Given the current state of Solana performance, the team is currently examining ways that it can contribute on an infrastructure level to Solana and bring additional revenue streams to Marinade that will strengthen the DAO further.
In July the Chefs will share an outlook on the DAO for the second half of 2022 and host an Open Kitchen so you can come ask all your questions.
It’s been quite a month but the Master Chefs are energized from their travels, connecting with one another and others in the Solana Ecosystem. One thing is for sure, there are many great things simmering across Solana. Stay tuned!
About Marinade
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 your stake account.
Marinade’s delegation strategy stakes to 400+ validators that are selected automatically by an open-source, fair formula based on performance, commission, and decentralization.
