Marinade Kitchen Stories - July 2023
Read more about what happened in the Kitchen during the busy month of July.
This month’s highlights:
Greetings Chefs, it’s been a hot Solana Liquid Staking Summer and we’ve seen activity and interest around staking in general on the network continue to grow.
If you visited Marinade in July you encountered a whole new staking dApp! This dApp was built from the ground up and is designed to serve as your home for all your staking needs. Upon connecting your wallet, the new dApp dashboard will identify all your liquid staking and native stake accounts, and give you the option to unstake or redelegate instantly.
Combined with Marinade's new liquidity router utilizing Jupiter and their latest updates for LST routes, as well as Marinade's own liquidity pool, SOL stakers can use Marinade's dApp to find the very best rates for any instant unstake operations, with many swaps usually costing as little as 0.1% in fees. This instant swap goes for any Solana liquid staking token as well as native stake accounts.
Remember, you can always redelegate or deposit stake accounts for mSOL instantly. There is no need to unstake and wait in order to get mSOL.
A new dApp just scratches the surface of what was an eventful July. Here’s a summary:
Launch of Marinade Native
A cornerstone of Marinade’s V.2 plans for 2023, Marinade Native is the first product on Solana that offers an algorithmic delegation strategy to 100+ validators in one click with no smart contract exposure. Rather than deposit into Marinade’s protocol to get mSOL, stakers simply delegate their stake authority to Marinade, who then applies its stake bot to the SOL and creates stake accounts for all the validators in the pool.
With 97% of SOL stake still utilizing native staking to single validators, this product was designed especially with early Solana investors and institutions who are not yet open to the idea of liquid staking and smart contracts on Solana, and want to have their stake automatically optimized via Marinade’s scoring strategy.
So far, there have been already 200,000 SOL staked to Marinade Native, and the team is working to get this unique product integrated across the ecosystem.
So whether you want to stake SOL liquid or natively, Marinade’s automated delegation strategy is available. Read more about why it makes sense to stake with Marinade instead of doing so on your own in this case study.
Governance Migration to Realms
The other major update in July was that Marinade has officially completed the migration of the DAO governance platform from Tribeca to Realms.
For those of you with Chef NFTs with locked MNDE, you will need to burn your NFTs and migrate the MNDE to Realms to retain voting power on items like proposals and the validator gauges (now Directed Stake).
To migrate your locked MNDE:
MNDE Validator Gauges → MNDE Directed Stake
Directed Stake now applies to both a holder’s mSOL and their locked MNDE. Upon migrating your MNDE to Realms, you’ll just have to direct stake to the validator of your choice by staking any amount of SOL to mSOL and selecting that validator. You will then be directing stake with both your mSOL and your locked MNDE.
Marinade’s stake pool is still controlled by 20% MNDE + 20% mSOL directed stake, and Marinade Native stake is considered part of the stake pool, so the more stake that is added via Native, the more stake that comes under control of mSOL and MNDE holders.
You can bookmark the new Marinade Realms DAO page here to see all the activity made.
More Governance updates
MNDE Liquidity mining is now officially under the Marinade Council control, and upon migrating to Realms, the Council has suspended MNDE liquidity mining and the gauges to reconsider alternative proposals that will drive more connection between TVL growth and MNDE rewards.
Liquidity Mining Next steps: A proposal is currently on the forum considering a new design around MNDE token incentives. Having determined over the course of 2022 that liquidity mining did not bring the subsequent TVL necessary, the new idea is to award 4 MNDE per 1 SOL staked to all users, whether they stake natively or for mSOL.
Be sure to read the forum post here and comment with any suggestions or feedback before the DAO takes it to a vote.
mSOL mining: If you have been staking mSOL or mSOL-SOL LPs to mine MNDE, that pool is now in withdrawal mode, so you can go to the DeFi page to withdraw your MNDE.
Marinade Terminal grant: The team at Solend has completed work on its “Marinade Terminal” that gives all DeFi protocols the ability to easily install a widget that identifies stake accounts that could be converted instantly for mSOL. The Marinade team will be collaborating with teams in the ecosystem to install this widget and help onboard more mSOL users and drive more MNDE via Open Doors to these partners.
The Marinade grant committee is always willing to listen to grant proposals. If you have a grant idea that can grow Marinade adoption, post your idea on the forum.
Treasury Report
July was one of the better financial months at Marinade in many months thanks to TVL growth through added stakers, mSOL price increase, and protocol unstake fees. In July alone, Marinade generated 36,160 in SOL rewards for stakers, while driving 3,340 SOL in commissions to the validators delegated.
In July, Marinade TVL grew by 3.44% to 6.455M SOL, bringing in a revenue of 2,380.5 SOL (management and unstake fees). In USDC terms this was $63,417 (+70.52% MoM). Operating expenses (USDC) were $110,799 (+17% MoM). For monthly operations, the mDAO paid out $49,095 in USDC and 1,002,330 MNDE for the month. This MNDE is taken out of the milestones budget, which has 38,801,079 MNDE remaining.
The total Marinade treasury value at the end of July is $543,199 (+29%). View the DAO wallet on Realms or the Treasury wallet on Sonar Watch.
It was a huge month for shipping at Marinade, and now it’s time to build and grow on top of these features. Looking ahead to August, Marinade is making further updates to the dApp and Realms, working to promote and integrate Marinade Native and the new Marinade Terminal, plus reviewing and distributing the latest Open Doors payouts to participating teams. There may possibly be a vote on the new MNDE incentives for all stakers who use Marinade, whether it’s natively or with mSOL.
Of course, you’re always welcome to join the kitchen. Join Discord and discuss mSOL strategies, governance, validators and anything else Solana-related. See you around!
