How Solana NFT Project UdderChaos milks its Validator and Marinade gauges for community benefit

NFT Project used Marinade stake and DAO gauges to drive value to its holders.

As NFT communities continue to evolve, project utility and token value capture is being explored and built upon in creative ways. A growing number of Solana projects have discovered that running validator can play a significant role in helping drive value back to its NFT or token holders.

For Solana NFT project UdderChaos, operating a validator was part of the project’s mission from the very beginning. Marinade’s stake pool and validator gauges have helped their validator earn stake and achieve profitability very early.

A bootstrapped, relatively small project might have too much going on from art to marketing and community to worry about a validator. But in fact, UdderChaos is a success story in quickly starting a validator and earning enough stake to be profitable thru its own methods combined with Marinade’s community tools.

As of August 30, UdderChaos has a Top 10 validator on Marinade’s gauges. SOL rewards from its validator are supporting its projects community and future roadmap.

UdderChaos is the 344th largest Solana Validator among over 1,800 according to Solana Beach with over 86,000 SOL staked. About ~40% comes directly from Marinade’s MNDE validator gauges.

How UdderChaos minted its NFT and launched a validator the same week

UdderChaos was launched by founder Jake and designer Yaz and minted on June 20, 2022 with a supply of 6,666 NFTs. Jake began his NFT journey on the Ethereum blockchain, but high gas fees and a project going to 0 was motivation enough to begin exploring other Layer-1 chains for his own project.

“I researched better blockchains and thought Solana had the best future,” said Jake. “There is a ton of potential with what they can do. I decided to be a part of it and [in addition to the NFT mint] running a validator was a good way to start.”

For UdderChaos, launching their Solana validator was easy thanks to the services of another project. Shakudo, a project that sets up validators for projects. They just so happened to be running a limited time deal around the time of the initial mint of UdderChaos. They signed up and had their validator live quickly and properly. Part of Shakudo’s installation was ensuring their validator was eligible to receive Marinade stake pool SOL.

24 hours after the project mint, UdderChaos had successfully staked 7,000 of its SOL earned thru the mint to its validator. Additionally, they soon began SOL from the Marinade stake pool.

Then attention turned to Marinade’s new validator gauges. Currently, gauges control 10% of the total Marinade stake pool, or about 760,000 SOL. On July 2, Jake introduced a vote in the community that would enable 25% of secondary sales of UdderChaos NFTs to be redirected towards acquiring and locking MNDE to be used in the gauges. It wasn’t much longer until the validator began receiving gauges votes:

The vote passed and the redirection of funds began. For example, in a Discord announcement on July 24, Jake shared with the community they had converted 190 SOL from the treasury into MNDE Chef NFTs and then used the Chef NFTs to vote to direct stake to UdderChaos. This resulted in 5,535 additional SOL directed to their validator.

Jake estimated utilizing the gauges has given UdderChaos an estimated 12% ROI on their stake vs. the expected 6%. Anyone can view real-time ROI projections of MNDE using validator Cogent Crypto’s MNDE profit calculator. The ROI can vary based on the value of MNDE and SOL, as well as validator commission and SOL eligible for Marinade stake. At this time, 10% of Marinade’s stake pool of over 7.5M SOL is delegated via the community voting gauges. However, the DAO could at any point vote to change this percentage of the stake pool.

Marinade and Udder Chaos: Unlocking Solana NFT-DeFi utility

NFTs continue to grow into more than just PFPs or JPEGs of colorful cows or octopus chefs. Exploring all the ways tokens and NFTs can enable web3 utility is something at the heart of Marinade and other Solana projects like Udder Chaos.

Marinade enables utility thus far through liquidity mining and validator gauges in addition to DAO on-chain governance, while the locked MNDE tokens in a Chef NFT unlock liquidity thru secondary market sales. Staking SOL with Marinade helps support DeFi liquidity by unlocking SOL stake and its delegation strategy and gauges give small projects a real chance to earn revenue from a validator.UdderChaos earns royalties from their initial NFT mints and resales in addition to revenue from their validator. Rather than direct SOL payments from project revenues to its NFT holders, they have instead chosen to unlock utility through their own SPL token, MILK and 25% of project revenues support it. The UdderChaos treasury supports MILK value and invests SOL funds in other projects. This includes offering rentals to MILK holders of other projects’ sniping or mint bots. UdderChaos has also introduced an RPC node which can be accessed via MILK and enables priority transactions on Solana. An RPC node is is especially valuable by helping to front-run transactions during mints or busy times on the network.

On the roadmap, Udder Chaos is also building a NFT reviews site. Users who leave reviews of NFT projects will be eligible for rewards in the MILK token. For NFT projects, mints are a rare chance to raise significant project funds, but by working with the Solana and Marinade community to create a validator, UdderChaos has a long-term source of SOL rewards that will compound to benefit the community.

VIDEO: How to use Validator Gauges