Marinade Kitchen Stories

Marinade’s Chefs packed in a lot of action into the shortest month of the year, from attending the Build Station conference in Berlin (which included a Marinade presentation on the stake pool delegation strategy), to further progress on key updates to mDAO Governance and MEV.

In February, Marinade drove significant value to participants throughout the Solana ecosystem. In total, nearly $500,000 worth of SOL was generated via the stake pool delegation. The vast majority of these fees went to stakers, while validators and the mDAO treasury also received a portion of these proceeds.

mTransaction surpasses 5 million transactions

mTransaction, Marinade’s MEV product which is a Solana blockchain bandwidth marketplace, has surpassed 5 million transactions in closed beta. Marinade has partnered with Validators and RPC providers to provide a fair option for users to send their transactions directly to the block leader, through staked nodes QUIC connections, improving their chances of being processed more quickly and reliably.

In times of high network volume, MEV can serve as a mechanism to both block network spam and also enable validators to earn additional fees by providing blockspace and bandwidth to priority seekers willing to pay a premium. Check out what one of the beta testers, Cogent Crypto, had to say recently when discussing MEV on Solana and mTransaction:

mDAO Governance updates

The build team has been heads down for several months now working on the migration of the mDAO from Tribeca to SPL-Realms Governance. This change is being made as a result of the greater Solana ecosystem moving to Realms as well as the idea of more open-source public goods building from the community being built that Marinade will be able to utilize moving forward. The work has been sent to an auditor with the hope the work is completed by mid-April.

In the meantime, drafts of a new Constitution and Code of Conduct have been submitted to the forum that will coincide with the migration.

Speaking of governance, an important proposal was posted by LJ which aims to update Marinade’s delegation strategy to reflect current decentralization, performance, market conditions of validators and staking on Solana overall. This has major implications for mSOL, MNDE holders, as well as validators across the network. Be sure to check it out and share your views.

DeFi lending with mSOL is storming back

Since the FTX-Alameda collapse and contagion, Solana DeFi has been working to bring back liquidity and in particular lend-borrow DApps better than ever before. We’re beginning to see the fruits of both revamped and brand new lend-borrow protocols that utilize the unique characteristics of the mSOL liquid staking token. In the past month, Solend, which held the most mSOL in 2022, released its v2 whitepaper outlining their path to revamping the DApp. A brand new protocol, MarginFi, has also launched mSOL lend-borrow and has teased a vault strategy for Liquid Staking tokens called “Superstaking” we’re looking forward to see it launch very soon. Coupled with Rain.Fi enabling mSOL borrowing via NFTs, Cypher allowing users to use mSOL as a collateral for margin trading and Psy protocols launching soon, there is a lot of promise for more mSOL utility. Users are already discussing the many ways to use mSOL in DeFi on Twitter. Come share and collaborate on your ideas in the mSOL-Strategies channel in Marinade Discord.

Treasury Report

in February, Marinade revenue was 1,264 mSOL ($32,181) earned via staking management fees and unstaking fees. Fees were lower than January mainly as a result of the shorter month and Solana network outage. Team expenses were $117,273 for the month ($38,826 USDC, $78,447 MNDE). Not included in these numbers is a $50,000 grant received from the Solana Foundation. 232,730 MNDE were distributed via liquidity mining.

The treasury balance to start March is $200,537 (+63%), 505,115 SLND and 3,808 mSOL. You can view Marinade’s active wallets anytime at these links: DeFi | Treasury

Community events

In 2023 Marinade launched a new Kitchen-rewards campaign, inviting our community to engage with Marinade’s Twitter content to build more exposure to key initiatives that the whole Solana ecosystem could benefit from. So far this year, Chefs have won an NFT from Claynosaurz, LFNTY (Lifinity), mSOL and HBB tokens! Keep an eye out for the next giveaway as well as some special events coming soon.

Marinade has been hosting bimonthly Open Kitchens so far in 2023 where the core contributors share key updates to projects on the growth and build side. These events are held in the Discord stage channel and offer an intimate setting to come to get alpha and ask questions about what’s cooking in the kitchen. Stay tuned to Discord or Twitter for the next event (Friday, March 16).