Marinade Kitchen Stories - December, 2023
Read more about what happened in the kitchen in December!
2023 ended on a high note at Marinade and throughout Solana. Activity picked up in DeFi as well as NFTs, gaming, DePin and elsewhere. Marinade was excited to be a part of it, receiving not only more stake from new users but also enjoyed more MEV rewards to distribute to stakers thanks to heightened chain activity from airdrops and more. As transactions grew, so did staking activity with Marinade. In fact, just days before the end of the year, Marinade achieved 11 million in SOL stake for the first time!
Did you miss anything in 2023? Check out this recap thread highlighting many of the milestones and products shipped throughout the year:
Marinade is among the projects in the ecosystem that are energized and ready to hit 2024 with both feet on the ground. But before we do, here’s a recap of December:
Marinade Treasury Report
In the previous Kitchen Stories, Marinade shared it had operated in profit for the first time in over a year. December took things further.
Marinade generated 2,597 mSOL in the month (553 worth from the liquidity pool). The growth in fees combined with the rise in SOL price produced $242,845 in USDC terms, a 119% increase MoM.
Expenses were $89,415 in USDC and 116,053 MNDE. This produced a monthly profit of $147,035 (+387% MoM).
Marinade is also using a portion of its treasury to supply MNDE-mSOL liquidity on Kamino — over $500,000 worth, which is also driving trading fees earned to further fuel the operational wallet. Total Treasury Value was $2,752,861 (+60% MoM). View the operational wallet on Sonar.Watch.
Marinade Earn Season update
The first Marinade Earn Season ended on December 31st and claims opened on January 1st. If you participated in Marinade Earn by staking SOL for mSOL or Marinade Native and earned at least 1 MNDE you are eligible to claim your locked MNDE. You have 90 days to claim this MNDE before the claiming period ends and it is clawed back and returned to the DAO wallet. Claim your MNDE here.
Read the step-by-step instructions on how to claim your MNDE in Discord or this Twitter post:
Season 2 update: Marinade has posted on the forum the framework for a potential Season 2 of the Earn campaign and the vote is live on Realms. If you have locked MNDE go vote here.
🛡️Introducing Protected Staking Rewards
In December, Marinade announced the latest step to improving the performance of the Marinade delegation strategy: Protected Staking Rewards.
Marinade’s goal is to delegate stake to as many Solana validators as possible , but do so without impacting the overall performance. Protected Staking Rewards enable Marinade to stake to significantly more validators, essentially any of them with strong performance and are willing to put up a SOL bond that guarantees their performance.
If the validator receives Marinade stake and suffers prolonged offline time or has other performance issues, Marinade will take a portion of their bond to cover the losses and it will be distributed to the stakers.
Doing so will give stakers the confidence they need to receive the very best performance while also supporting Solana decentralization. Read more about PSR in the announcement article here.
In addition to PSR, Marinade is also working on updates to the delegation strategy. Marinade would like to apply its algorithm to more than 100 validators. In fact, the core team is researching the best way to algorithmically add to the number of validators staked based on the amount of SOL in the pool, so the more SOL that comes to Marinade, the more validators can be supported.
The growth in on-chain activity has also resulted in more MEV for Marinade, as well as priority fees for validators. Marinade wants to determine the best way to apply these relatively new reward streams to the scoring.
If you’re a validator, Marinade is soliciting feedback in the Discord #Validators channel. Please get in touch to share your thoughts on the delegation as well as get onboarded to the initial PSR pilot. Stakers can stay tuned to the Marinade Forum as the changes to the delegation strategy are proposed.
Discord/community revamp coming
The fall of 2023 saw a huge spike in interest in Solana DeFi as well as within the Marinade community. While Marinade had fewer resources dedicated to the community during the bear market for budget purposes, the renewed interest means it’s time to scale up the community efforts once again. Marinade has enlisted Dean’s List for a revamp of the Discord, which will take place in January, so stay tuned for an increased presence, including more support and education about staking and Solana and using Marinade.
More ecosystem integrations
Marinade continues to be integrated as a liquidity base layer across Solana. Here are a few highlights from December:
SDX brought options trading back to Solana and is doing so with mSOL as its first asset available. It’s already seeing considerable interest as on-chain trading activity continues to grow on Solana.
Step.Finance updated its asset dashboard’s display for Marinade Native and rolled all stake accounts into one line as well. Step also recently introduced Step Options for those who direct stake to their validator through Marinade.
Sonar.Watch also updated its wallet dashboard to bundle Native stake accounts into one line, making it a much cleaner look for users.
And Sanctum is currently working to integrate Marinade into its interconnected LST liquidity router which will provide a liquidity backstop for large market swaps beyond any mSOL pools. Thanks to Marinade’s recent contract upgrade in Q4, mSOL is now compatible with Sanctum and will be live soon pending some final work between the teams.
Three exchanges add MNDE
Liquidity both on-chain and within central exchanges continues to improve for the MNDE token. December brought a trio of notable new listings as exchanges raced to add more SPL tokens in the wake of added user activities.
Kucoin listed MNDE:
Crypto.com also announced MNDE trading on their platform:
And, CubeX, a new exchange building on Solana, listed MNDE as one of its earliest SPL tokens for trading.
Marinade also announced a partnership with the OKX wallet. Stake SOL for mSOL from their wallet and earn MNDE on top of your staking rewards. Heading into 2024, Marinade will continue working on further partnerships with both CEX’s and DEX’s as well as all the leading wallets to be sure Marinade Native and mSOL along with the very best Solana DeFi dApp are promoted prominently.
A look ahead to 2024
Chef Repe shared some closing thoughts on 2023 and a glimpse into 2024 in Discord. You can read the message in full here. Here is the initial outlook for 2024:
To keep building on the strong foundation and responsible management of the TVL growth, Marinade plans to invest heavily in security: new audits, formal verification, oracle system, and alerting infrastructure.
To help the Solana network at a much bigger scale, the plan is to establish 1,000 profitable independent Solana validators by algorithmically distributing 40M SOL stake through Marinade (~10% of the total Solana stake). It’s no small feat, and we’ll need all of you to keep spreading the message and drive the point home.
There is no VC funding, backroom deals, and little marketing budget for the rescue. And at the end of the day, that’s not what matters — Marinade is a living example. We are blessed with such a positive and supportive community that’s been with Marinade through the ups and downs. So here’s to making 2024 successful for all of us.
