Driving community, liquidity and decentralization: Introducing the Marinade Open Doors Program

The vision for Marinade has been pretty clear since the beginning, even if the path has had its unexpected twists along the way: Serve as a public good for Solana with an end goal to be a DAO governed on-chain by leading Solana ecosystem players.

So far, it’s been done through ecosystem grants, a fair-launch MNDE token launch, on-chain DAO governance and the Token Exchange Program.

The next, big step on this journey is the Open Doors Program.

Open Doors is a 12-month program accessible to Solana projects, validators, and wallets offering up to 160M MNDE (16% of total token supply) in additional incentives to grow up to 40 million mSOL adoption via their platform.

Net mSOL increase for Marinade TVL deposited in these protocols between Feb. 1, 2023 and January 31, 2024 will be eligible for rewards of 4 MNDE per 1 mSOL held over 12 months, distributed throughout the actors that participated to bring or host it.

The mission of the Open Doors Program is to increase Solana’s censorship resistance and the overall liquidity of Solana DeFi while also distributing more Marinade governance power via MNDE token to leading ecosystem players.

“We are thrilled to participate in the Marinade Open Door Program. This initiative gives us the flexibility to explore and incentivize new use cases for mSOL.We believe this program will help unlock a new batch of SOL liquidity to power DeFi ecosystem-wide while strengthening the network.”— Stendhal, Partnerships at Raydium

How Open Doors improves Solana decentralization and liquidity

Marinade’s stake pool delegation strategy distributes to validators outside the superminority, so the more SOL staked to Marinade, the more widely distributed Solana’s stake becomes, and its Nakamoto Coefficient, a measure of network decentralization, rises.

Liquid staking deposits like mSOL also enable Solana DeFi liquidity. 70% of SOL tokens are staked, but only 2-3% of this is liquid. That means roughly 2/3 of SOL tokens cannot be used in DeFi. The more the stake becomes liquid and distributed through the Marinade pool, the more fuel Solana DeFi has to grow.

The Open-door program will be split into use cases and Marinade’s team has 3 months to release any additional use cases allowed to participate. The use cases that will start on February, 1st are:

1) Protocols having a part of their TVL containing mSOL

2) Validators using the Liquid-self stake product

3) Individuals using the referral program

These protocols who receive MNDE deposits are free to distribute them either through liquidity mining or keep and lock the tokens in a Chef NFT to participate in mDAO governance.

MNDE token distribution for builders

The MNDE token has undergone significant utility enhancements since its on-chain governance launched in April, 2022. Liquidity Mining and Validator Gauges were introduced, allowing MNDE holders to direct SOL stake to validators and MNDE liquidity mining emissions to protocols.

In October, 2022, MNDE and mSOL were listed for trading on Coinbase as well as Gate.io, providing even deeper liquidity for the tokens. mSOL is also tradable on Kraken.

The concept and effectiveness of liquidity mining has been the subject of much debate and votes by the DAO in 2022. The analysis found that liquidity mining was not a good source of sticky mSOL TVL growth. A treasury gauge was voted on and introduced that gave holders the option to direct MNDE missions back to the treasury. 77% of emissions were voted to be sent back to the treasury. Then, another vote was passed that reduced the 1M token emissions further down to 250,000.

Currently, about 60,000 MNDE is being distributed weekly via liquidity mining. | View the current pools receiving MNDE on the liquidity mining homepage

For liquidity miners in DeFi seeking APY, the MNDE token will be more difficult to get with less of it available in various pools and collateral. For builders and those driving liquid staking liquidity through mSOL, MNDE has never been more accessible.

Projects and validators interested in the Open Doors Program can reference this information sheet for details on the program’s calculations and distributions.

About MNDE | About mSOL | How to use mSOL in DeFi | Liquid Self-Stake