Marinade Kitchen Stories - January 21, 2022

The kitchen continues to grow with integrations of mSOL across Solana. Marinade also achieved the top spot in Solana TVL and is continuing to grow its team.

It’s been an exciting and busy January in the kitchen, highlighted by a wave of partnership and integrations announced and launched. Marinade will achieve its longterm goals by making mSOL the easiest and most widely used collateral token available and thanks in part to our referral program, great strides have been made in 2022.

mSOL gains value and utility as the Solana ecosystem itself grows, and the more mSOL in circulation, the greater Solana itself is secured and decentralized. So it’s also very encouraging to see how much overall investment, from DeFi dAPPs to NFT platforms (Welcome, Michael Jordan!), continues to be announced. New wallets are being created while unique signers on Solana continue to break records daily.

It’s an exciting time to be a part of it all! In fact, Marinade is looking to add to its team (see below for how to apply!). Here’s a rundown of what’s being dished up lately:

The Marinade App Relaunch is complete!

The new-look and new features of Marinade.Finance.

First off, if you’ve been to Marinade.Finance lately you’ve seen its brand new look! In addition to the color and design being more welcoming and friendly, there are other enhancements: Marinators can view real-time epoch duration (which will help you decide if you want to unstake instantly for a small fee or wait it out). A validator’s table is also accessible from the staking page in order to see where stake is being allocated. Another feature for mSOL staking is the simplified Unstake view where you can select between “Unstake Now” or “Delayed Unstake” side-by-side.

The DeFi page was also redesigned to accommodate the growing list of integrations. Be sure to hover over each integration’s info icon, which provides a breakdown of stats for each potential “Double Dip” APY . Is your project integrating mSOL? If so, you can be added the DeFi page! Visit this Docs page for instructions on how to add your project.

Marinade, Hubble partnership featured in Bitcoinist

Investment into the Solana ecosystem has been coming at a rapid pace to start 2022, featuring even the likes of Michael Jordan getting into the NFT space. This investment is also happening to protocols integrating mSOL. Hubble, for example, recently announced the addition of mSOL integration. In fact, it was their first formally announced partnership with another Solana-based project. Days later, Hubble revealed a $10 million funding round to continue building their protocol that will feature USDH, a censorship-resistant stablecoin. This week, their progress was featured in Bitcoinist, whose write-up also featured a mention of their commitment to the mSOL token:

“Users can opt to have their tokens staked in a PoS liquid staking protocol, Marinade. When the user returns their loan, not only do they reap the profits of whatever application their USDH was leveraged on, they also stand to receive profits from their original* $SOL tokens” — Bitcoinist

Hubble plans to release its mainnet zero-interest lending protocol by the end of January. Keep an eye out for it!

Marinade claims top TVL spot on Solana

Here’s another milestone for mSOL: Last week, Marinade achieved the№1 for TVL (Total Value Locked) on Solana according to data from DeFI Llama! Marinade had been in the Top 3 for awhile, but the occasion marked the first time the achieved the top spot. It’s a close race with a lot of movement in the top spot, but we have since reclaimed it this week. We’re confident that as we continue to add to our list of integrators and partnerships our TVL will soar. Keep in mind our target TVL by the beginning of 2023 is 30 million SOL in TVL and 15% of all SOL staked.

DeFi Lllama TVL statistics for the Solana blockchain on January 20th.

AMA’s with Artemis Market, Project Larix

Seb, Marinade’s Head of Community, hosted two AMA’s in the Marinade Discord recently with two the newest integrators of mSOL.

The first was with Artemis Market, which is bringing a brand new NFT and social platform to Solana. They shared how they’ll bring more stickiness to the NFT marketplace experience and why they’ve already integrated mSOL. We’ve added a topics rundown to our YouTube description for these AMAs, which you can view on the Artemis Market — Marinade video page.

Marinade also welcomed Project Larix to the Discord. Larix is a new lending protocol that will also feature the ability to lend with mSOL. It’s always great to hear other dAPPs explain how critical mSOL is to their own user adoption. Here’s what Dmitri from Project Larix had to say:

“mSOL is the best form of collateral because it’s the go-to liquid staking protocol on the Solana chain…As soon as we launched we had to get the large caps, the stablecoins, and we had to get mSOL.”

You can watch the full Project Larix — Marinade AMA on our YouTube channel. More AMA’s are planned, so keep an eye out on the Marinade Discord for the latest guests!

The quest for Decentralization: Solana’s Nakamoto Coefficient rises

Marinade is on a mission to decentralize Solana, so we were excited to hear when a Marinator observed in our Discord that, according to Solana Beach, the chain’s Nakamoto Coefficient went from 19 to 20. The Nakamoto Coefficient is defined as the minimum number of entities required that could collude for a 51% attack against any given network. The Marinade Finance delegation strategy for validators is designed to spread the steak beyond the chain’s largest validators, which brings continued decentralization and security to the network, so anytime a SOL token is staked at Marinade, it helps raise the all-important Nakamoto Coefficient. (Read more about Marinade’s Validator Delegation Strategy)

Marinade is growing and hiring!

As you can see, the kitchen is busy and we are in need of more chefs! We’re currently hiring a Chef-herder to help with our growth. This person will help screen job candidates, document HR-related processes and contribute to other people-related projects. Experience in Human Resources as well as working in Notion is a plus. To apply, please fill out this form and we’ll be in touch.

And now for some Mysteria fun …

Well, we’re approaching weekend after all, so it’s time for some fun and games. If you’re in our Marinade Discord channel looking for something new to play, jump into our Announcements channel where we have directions on how to gain exclusive access to the launch of Mysteria. In collaboration with partners Saber, Friktion, Jupiter and SonarWatch. Over 160 members of our community have taken advantage of this exclusive event so far! And we also learned that the first puzzle solved in Mysteria came from a member in our Discord. Big brains at Marinade!

That covers our latest update from the Kitchen. But we’re cooking up so much more. The Marinade team continues to grow and we’ve been reorganizing our Notion space to reflect each team’s workflow, OKRs and priorities. We’re also preparing a public Notion that will be visible to anyone. This all fits our belief that we want to not only decentralize Solana but also make Marinade transparent and decentralized as well! Stay tuned for more updates in regards to our 2022 roadmap, the NFT-DAO and MNDE project very soon.

About Marinade Finance

Marinade.Finance is the first non-custodial liquid staking protocol built on Solana. Stake your SOL tokens with Marinade and receive mSOL (marinated SOL) tokens in return that can be used in decentralized finance (DeFi). mSOL is the most widely integrated collateralized version of SOL. The price of mSOL goes up relative to SOL each epoch, with rewards being accrued into the underlying staked SOL.

Marinade’s liquid staking stakes in 400+ validators that are selected automatically by an open-source, fair formula based on performance, commission, and decentralization.

Marinade includes mSOL->SOL swap, so you can “Unstake Now!” and receive your SOL immediately with a small fee. You can also directly exchange between mSOL and SOL on secondary markets at the current rate. Finally, you can unstake your SOL with zero fee by waiting 4–6 days for the Solana cool-down period (delayed unstake).