Marinade Kitchen Stories - August 2022

In August, Marinade celebrated its one-year anniversary on mainnet!

Greetings everyone! Summer is winding down and it’s time to reflect on a very eventful month of August in the Marinade Kitchen.

In fact, at the beginning of August, Marinade celebrated its first birthday! That’s right, time flies when you’re driving decentralization and liquidity to Solana and having a lot of fun (and meals) doing it. It’s incredible to think just how far Marinade has come since bringing liquid staking to Solana a year ago. Today, over 7.5 million SOL has been staked at Marinade, there have never been more validators and Solana itself continues to grow more decentralized.

Want to take a trip down memory lane? Check out this celebratory Twitter thread about the Top 10 events of Marinade’s first year.

But that isn’t to say Marinade is resting at the top. August was full of updates and milestones. Check out the latest Kitchen Stories for your roundup of all the key highlights:

Multi-sig and institutional integrations for mSOL

August was a big month for integrations with institutional and multi-sig projects integrating Marinade and mSOL.

Fireblocks, a leading institutional wallet service with over 1,300 clients, added Marinade in its first wave of Solana dApps to its Web3 Engine along with Mango Markets and Friktion.

“Fireblocks is a leader in enabling enterprise clients to access Web3. By integrating WalletConnect v2.0, Fireblocks is leveraging our updated protocol’s multi-chain capabilities to offer its users access to decentralized applications across EVM as well as non-EVM chains, starting with Solana. We’re thrilled to cooperate with such a trusted partner to unlock a new ecosystem of exciting innovation for its customers.” — Pedro Gomes, Co-founder and CEO of Fireblocks

Fireblocks was also integrated on the Marinade dApp as well using Wallet Connect. Wallet Connect support enables not only Fireblocks wallets, but over a dozen others. (You will also notice the Brave Wallet was also officially added and is in the wallet dropdown as well).

Additionally, two Solana multisig protocols also integrated Marinade. Snowflake integrated mSOL staking directly into its Snowflake Safe app for multisig teams. Meanwhile, Cashmere, another multisig wallet, debuted its “Earn Yield” experience featuring Marinade liquid staking.

As the first Solana liquid staking providers to these three protocols, These moves continue to set up mSOL to be utilized as a productive asset for larger teams’ treasuries and also stand to benefit the decentralization of the Solana Ecosystem! Integrations into institutions and teams continue to be a point of emphasis for the Master Chefs.

Solana Legend hosts Marinade for a Spaces

One of Solana’s most influential voices on Twitter, Solana Legend, recently joined Marinade as an ambassador, and hosted Chef Seb for the first of several Spaces on Twitter. The two discussed everything from mSOL utilization to decentralization and Marinade’s unique Chef NFTs. They even floated the idea of testing mSOL liquid staking vs. SOL stake rewards to see which performs better, and a contest is being worked out.

Check out this clip from the event where Solana Legend talks about Marinade’s NFT concept and listen to the full spaces while it’s still live on Twitter (links expire after two weeks).

August Treasury Report

In August, the management fees of Marinade were raised to 6% following an on-chain vote, and the Unstake liquidity pool fee split was moved to 50%/50% between Marinade and liquidity providers. Those changes had a positive impact on cashflow, as they were designed to bring Marinade back to a neutral cashflow at least.

With this new fee structure, Marinade brought in 1,325 mSOL (approximately $52,907 in USDC) to the treasury during the month of August. Since the changes on management fee were applied on August, 13 and the ones on the Unstake pool fee split on August, 25, Marinade did not benefit from them over the whole month. The Master Chefs project these fees for a whole month will nearly double in September.

On the side of expenses, $89,848 USDC and $45,071 worth of MNDE (for a total of 1,048,159 MNDE) were used to pay contributors. The liquidity mining budget stayed the same, with 4M MNDE distributed according to the votes on gauges.

The total balance for August is therefore -$36,941 if we only account for USDC, and -$82,012 including MNDE expenses. The Master Chefs expect Marinade to break even in September (in terms of USDC).

Master Chef updates

The Master Chefs had a couple updates in August. Ryfo, one of Marinade’s community managers decided to leave the kitchen to focus on other things. Thanks to him, Marinade has been able to work even more with NFT projects and the kitchen is sad to see him leave, but wish him good luck in all his future endeavors.

On the other hand, Hamster joined the kitchen and will lead the Build workgroup, responsible of shipping all those juicy updates to Marinade, its governance and all the new things that Marinade is building! We can also mention PlayerOfBits taking the lead of the Growth workgroup, with the objective of bringing TVL in and oversee the strategic approach of Marinade.

Chat Support integrated into Marinade dApp

Helping onboard Solana users to DeFi with a professional, 24/7 support team has been integral to Marinade. But why should a user have to leave the dApp to go to Discord’s Support channel with their questions, or risk getting a DM on Twitter or Telegram from an imposter? That’s why marinade added support right on Marinade.Finance itself via Crisp.

We want all current and future chefs to be able to easily and safely seek help for all Marinade has to offer, from liquid staking to minting NFT Chefs and anything else. The support team operates 24/7 and has deep knowledge of all that is going on in the kitchen. Their average response time is exceptional at under 2 minutes! So if you should have a question the next time you are at Marinade, give it a try by clicking on the chat icon in the bottom right corner.

Mint a Chef NFT with other tokens

Here’s another feature added to the MNDE page of the dApp: Mint a Chef NFT even if you don’t have MNDE! Visit the MNDE page in the app and connect wallet. There is a new dropdown that will list your available balance of all eligible tokens. At this time, the tokens supported are: mSOL, SOL, USDC, USDT, ETH, BTC. Two transactions will occur: swapping the assets to MNDE and then locking it into a Chef NFT!

The limited edition won’t be live for very much longer. Want to mint a Chef? Give it a try!

Marinade at the Stockholm Hacker House

Finally, August was also the occasion for the Marinade chefs to visit Stockholm and attend the latest Solana Hacker House!

After an extensive visit of the city, the Chefs have been able to discuss and exchange with a lot of Solana projects, old and new, and come back with a lot of ideas, interesting discussions in mind and good memories. This Hacker House was also a perfect opportunity to discuss with some members of the Solana team during their office hours and exchange and benefit from their expertise in their respective fields. Demo day was, as always, filled with interesting new projects introducing what they’ve been building and their recordings should become available soon. We recommend that you take a look!

Marinade also co-sponsored the latest event from Alpha League Racing, which was announced and launched on stage at the Hacker House and brought in racers from across the ecosystem competing for over $2,500 in prizes, including some mSOL. This multi-day tournament was so popular, ALR decided to add a bonus event with Marinade that featured a challenge to beat Chef Cerba’s fast time at Marinade island. Racers got to cruise through the custom course built for Marinade earlier in 2022.

Well, who says August is a time for rest and vacation? While some Chefs were able to get some R&R during the month, there was still plenty of highlights for the month, and September is shaping up to be busy as well, including multiple governance proposals ready for a vote and events already being planned.

Have a great September everyone, and we’ll see you around the Kitchen.