Launching MNDE: How was it and what’s next?

A lot has happened in the past few weeks around Marinade, so it’s about time to give a summary. We’ve seen massive TVL and revenue growth, delivered a handful of new mSOL DeFi recipes, passed another audit, and built a solid foundation for collective contribution to the Marinade DAO.

Let the numbers talk:

And what’s best is that you can check all these stats yourself thanks to the new public dashboard at https://stats.marinade.finance/

Security audit and code review reports

Marinade has recently passed yet another audit, this time by Kudelski Security.

 “There is a focused methodology that we follow in reviewing solutions such as Marinade. Not only do we review a threat assessment of possible exploits of the system, but we conduct a review of the code, appropriate usage of the SPL, fund loss scenarios, and program authentication scenarios and components. In all situations, the team had very strong solutions that met our requirements for an effectively implemented product, including resolving any findings we uncovered along the way. “—Scott Carlson, Kudelski Security

All the audit and code review reports are publicly available:

To learn more about our security, visit Marinade docs.

What’s new for mSOL?

After becoming the #1 asset by TVL for most of the AMMs and on leading lending protocols such as Port and Larix, mSOL became a standard for pretty much any other project launching on Solana.

Lending protocols

Apricot launched and integrated mSOL right off the bat.

Francium allowed for mSOL deposits on their platform.

And finally, we’re happy to have mSOL listed on Solend.

Oracles

The mSOL price feed is now live on Pyth.network

And we’ve also announced a partnership with Chainlink to power the Solana ecosystem with a robust and reliable mSOL/USD price feed by the end of the year.

AMM

In the past weeks, we saw some new protocols coming into the AMM space on Solana to join the established mSOL adopters such as Raydium, Serum, Saber, and Orca.

We partnered with Mercurial and introduced a non-pegged stable pool for mSOL-SOL.

Aldrin chose Marinade and mSOL from the start for their AMM launch.

There are five mSOL pools on Aldrin paired with USDC, USDT, UST, BTC, and ETH.

And last but not least, our community launched an mSOL-STEP pool on Step.finance.

Perps

The Marinade community is super happy to have Mango join the mSOL decentralization movement.

Exchanges

We promised to show the progress over the first month of MNDE, but the list is getting quite long — let’s close it with the one and only FTX Exchange that now accepts mSOL for conversions and deposits.

What’s next?

Marinade staking as a service

Besides driving adoption through the ecosystem mSOL integrations, many projects reached out to Marinade wanting to integrate the liquid staking service itself. That’s why we’re finishing Marinade SDK, which will allow pretty much anybody in the SOL ecosystem to plug in Marinade staking in their products and services. Now it’s about time to put it in action — some of your favorite projects on Solana are already cooking.

Scale up the Marinade team

We’re excited to get more and more people to join as Marinade contributors.

To make it easier to understand what Marinade is all about and our high-level goals, there is a DAO section in our docs with The Grand Plan and Roadmap sections. This way, anybody can see what’s going on, what’s next, and can apply to be a contributor to Marinade.

Also, the time has come and Marinade has now finally listed its first official job positions on Solana jobs. Check them out!

Trust and transparency

Marinade wants to lead by example to be the most transparent in every aspect. That’s why we released a public dashboard with all the Marinade stats and open sourced multiple projects for the community to benefit from.

Marinade wants to build in the open, and that’s why the next step is to publish every single line of code of the Marinade program and web application — to allow practically anybody to freely participate.

Redesign

We’re in the process of completely redoing the documentation since it was becoming outdated.

To reflect on the massive growth and Marinade adoption, we’re also rethinking the way Marinade presents itself. It’s now obvious the liquid staking category is getting quite constrained given the overall vision.

Marinade is now perceived as a DAO that aims to make Solana fundamentally better: more decentralized, capital-efficient, and easy to work with. A DAO that is fully inclusive, diverse, and made up of the whole Solana community.

Because of this, we’re giving Marinade a new look. It doesn’t matter if you’re small or big, fish or whale — it’s the fact that we care about Solana that connects us all.

Here’s a small teaser before we ship it to production.

We all work together to make Solana more secure, robust, and decentralized.

NFTs and governance

We heard some people joking that the only excuse not to be all in mSOL is that mSOL won’t mint or buy you NFTs. Except it’s not a joke, it’s quite true!

That’s why we partnered with multiple NFT projects on Solana, and some of them are already on a mission to make Solana more censorship-resistant through staking their SOL treasuries with Marinade.

We see NFTs as a great way to connect and engage the Marinade community with other communities on Solana. With this in mind, we designed a pilot project that’s going to connect NFTs and MNDE — bridging the gap between fun and governance.

Have a look, and stay tuned for future announcements!

Marinade aims to make Solana better — please let us know how we’re doing and what we can do to improve. Please reach out to us on Discord or Twitter!