Marinade Kitchen Stories - February, 2024

Marinade is completing development on Protected Staking Rewards and the Delegation Strategy, which will deliver Max Decentralization and Max Performance to stakers.

Protocol TVL was up 2.57%, revenues up 8%, and the operational treasury was up 21% (MoM).

Partnership highlights include YBX, a new mSOL and LST-backed stablecoin, and BSKT index allocating to MNDE.

Marinade packed a lot of action into the shortest month of the year. And things continue ramping up into the springtime as the team heads on the road to conferences all over the world. Will you be at any of the following events? If so, be sure to reach out, and let’s meet up IRL!

Blockworks Digital Assets Summit, London (March 18–24)

Solana Hacker House, New York City (March 28–29)

Solana Crossroads, Istanbul, Turkey (May 10–11)

Island DAO (May-June)

Marinade was also a gold sponsor and presenter at the Kumeka Hackathon community event in Kyiv, Ukraine. The energy around the world for Solana right now is palpable and Marinade is eager to contribute to all the builder energy and share what we’re working on and how projects throughout crypto can use Marinade for the benefit of their products and communities.

Here’s a roundup of everything that happened in February:

Protected Staking Rewards and Delegation Strategy update

The rollout of Protected Staking Rewards and updates to the delegation strategy are continuing to take shape and nearing completion.

The latest article discusses many of the details and timeline. Here’s a tl:dr

PSR is now influencing the delegation strategy but is not funded yet. Over 330 validators have set up their bond and are eligible for stake. There was a recent commission-change incident with two validators that helps demonstrate how PSR will protect stakers more than ever before.

Both the funding of PSR and updates to the delegation strategy have been put to votes on Realms. The votes were live as of the publishing of this update. You can view the status of each on Realms governance: https://app.realms.today/dao/MNDE

An audit of the PSR program is currently underway.

The Delegation Strategy Playground link has also been updated. Anyone is invited to try out the playground to see how various parameters would affect their stake from Marinade: https://playground.marinade.finance/

Other items to discuss over the next couple of weeks are addressing the stake weights from 20% mSOL, 20% MNDE and 60% delegation strategy to new weights. There has been a lot of interest in the community in raising the weight for MNDE, and the ability to vote for the Marinade algorithm also introduces new dynamics. Stay tuned for that forum post and subsequent discussion.

Introducing the Solana BBQ

There’s so much happening around Solana in 2024, and with Marinade community growing there’s a desire to share more and more updates of everything you can do on Solana from DeFi to DePin and gaming and so much more.

Marinade teamed up with HXRO to host weekly “Solana BBQ’s” on Spaces with leading projects both established and new around the ecosystem. The BBQ will talk DeFi, decentralization, as well as consumer apps and other hot topics. So far, the BBQ has had guests like Step, Coindesk, Solana Foundation, Guac, Psy Options, Lifinity, Jupiter, and more!

Jakey x Marinade collab

When Solana content megastar Jakey recently tweeted he was a big fan of Marinade, it made all the sense in the world to reach out and do a collab. Jakey produced a video on Marinade’s unique value proposition of handling the stake delegation so you don’t have another thing to worry about in Web 3. The video got a lot of action on X. Check it out:

February Treasury Report

Marinade continues to operate in profit and is boosting operational support in areas such as community and marketing to continue growth. TVL grew 2.57% MoM to 10.732M SOL. Revenue to the protocol was $259,058 (2,099 mSOL), up 8% in USDC terms. Operational expenses were $101,905 (-10%), which was paid out in USDC besides 21,335 MNDE (~$5,000), bringing in a final profit for the month of $157,153. Total Operational treasury value is up 21% at $2.643 million.

Latest Partnerships

Partnerships across Solana continue to accelerate as chain activity and attention pick up. Marinade had a busy February full of campaigns to help grow the ecosystem together:

DeFi Llama is now tracking Marinade protocol fees on the project page. Check it out.

RainFi introduced NFT loans with a select list of SPL tokens including mSOL.

MarginFi introduced YBX, a stablecoin backed by liquid staking tokens including mSOL.

BSKT is a new index-style product and token that tracks the top assets across the Solana ecosystem and added MNDE to their basket of assets.

Marinade is also publishing Validator Spotlights on Twitter. Check out the latest with Sovereign SOL. If you’re a validator interested in some promotion, get in touch with Chef btuck in Discord.

The team has been busy speaking with projects on every level throughout Solana and the digital asset space, collaborating to find partnerships and integrate Marinade staking into products. Stay tuned for some exciting announcements on this front soon.

Community update: Introducing PubKey

Marinade recently enlisted Dean’s List to support the community operations including moderation and support in Discord. Another big update is the transition to Pubkey. After winning first place in the Solana Hyperdrive Hackathon for Crypto Infrastructure, PubKey has taken verification tooling and community gating to the next level. If you haven’t been to the Discord lately be sure to stop by and see what’s new. Read some of the details about PubKey below and get excited to see another OPOS project integrated into communities all over crypto.