Marinade Kitchen Stories

Hello Chefs, Marinade hit the ground running in 2023 with lots of hot plates sizzling in the kitchen. It was especially encouraging to see all the great energy from the Solana community. It’s clear that ecosystem builders are assuming a more prominent leadership position and there are so many community initiatives happening it can be tough to keep up with them all.

Marinade’s stake pool continues to stabilize following the FTX-Alameda fallout and its dominance of TVL in the Solana ecosystem remains high at 56% dominance as of January 6th. As an example of how much revenue is flowing through the protocol each month check out these stats:

At an average SOL price of $23.92 in January, Marinade earned 1,926 SOL in fees, but generated 2,070 SOL for validators and 26,126 SOL for stakers! That’s over 30,000 SOL generated for all parties. With SOL at an average of $23.92, that translates to $720,000 of fees generated by Marinade. Considering how little liquid staking is being used compared to traditional staking, there is still a huge amount of opportunity for MNDE holders, stakers and validators via Marinade’s tools.

On to the rest of the news for January:

mDAO votes in January

mDAO completed two votes in January. Proposal 29 aimed to reduce liquidity mining by 75% from 1M per week to 250k per week. It passed overwhelmingly. With the “Do not distribute” gauge still receiving over 75% of votes, this means only ~60k MNDE are being distributed via liquidity mining per week.

Up next, Proposal 30 did not pass. This proposal called to have unstaked SOL currently not claimed by users who used Marinade’s delayed function redeposited into the Marinade stake pool. The proposal failed in the end with a record amount of tokens used to vote (over 60M MNDE!).

mDAO members are invited to propose alternate ideas on how to manage the SOL (over 1 million, currently), by discussing in the forum.

Marinade sponsors Lamport DAO Hackathon

January was a big month for building on Solana. Not only did the Hacker House kick off in Istanbul, Turkey, but a community-led hackathon with scores of different tracks and prizes was conducted by Lamport DAO, a Solana builder’s community.

Marinade was involved in two tracks and utilized the grant budget to fund two prizes for developers who contribute tools from which Marinade will benefit. Marinade co-sponsored a liquid-staking track with SolBlaze and awarded the first prize to Sunrise Stake, which is building liquid staking that will use its profits to offset carbon emissions generated by its validator. Second place went to Cogent Crypto who built staking via xNFTs.

The other track was on Solana Snapshots. This was won by Dipfit.sol who built an indexer that can monitor all holdings of any SPL token at any point in time, and soon be able to include collateral deposits and borrows. This will be beneficial to further optimize Open Doors and improving the liquidity of validator stake.

Did you miss Sandstorm? Well, Solana just announced the Grizzlython Hackathon. Devs, check out the tracks and get building!

Open Doors Program officially launches

February 1st officially launched the Open Doors Program. This is an ambitious program voted on by the DAO in December to further incentivize ecosystem builders to attract mSOL deposits from their users and build protocols with new mSOL use cases. Marinade is on a mission to drive 40M mSOL into the Solana ecosystem over the next 12 months, which would have huge benefits for ecosystem decentralization and liquidity thanks to the delegation strategy of mSOL supporting a large network of validators.

Validators are also invited to use Marinade’s Liquid Self-Stake feature to earn more mSOL. For each mSOL held over 12 months, these parties (protocols, validators, or wallets) can earn up to 4 MNDE.

Other users can continue to mine MNDE via its existing use cases in DeFi like staking mSOL for MNDE or depositing SOL to liquidity pools to earn fees and rewards.

Protocols have already begun signaling their participation, which is available to all protocols in the ecosystem. Those who have not yet joined are invited to comment on the forum post so Marinade can ensure it is tracking their protocols’ mSOL usage. Protocols and validators and wallets are welcome to reference this one-sheeter with program details and get in touch with a master Chef to have any questions answered.

January Treasury Report

In January Marinade protocol earned 1,765 mSOL from management fees of the liquid staking service and from the liquid unstake pool.

Expenses for the month totaled $56,261 USDC and $88,844 worth of MNDE (this was the final month where liquidity mining was set to 1M per week — it is now 250k per week max — however 77% of this is currently being sent back to treasury). Liquidity mining distributed 727,143 MNDE ($43,688) in January.

For February, Marinade’s treasury balance is now $123,265 USDC (+17.92%), 505,115 SLND and 4,543 mSOL (-34.19%). You can always view Marinade’s wallets on-chain here: DeFi | Treasury

With regards to the treasury, USDC runway and utilization of MNDE, Marinade’s board recently voted on major changes to MNDE distribution and team compensation that puts more emphasis on mSOL TVL and accomplishments than simpler vesting based on time. It is also going to ensure that USDC balance maintains its current levels, while also reducing the amount of monthly MNDE spent until TVL milestones are achieved. Be sure to keep an eye out on the Blog or subscribe to Dialect Web3 content alerts from Marinade to see it!

Open Kitchens and Chefs on Twitter

There is a lot going on right now so for 2023 Marinade is eager to share regular updates and give the community a chance to hear directly from the Master Chefs themselves. Marinade held two Open Kitchen AMAs in the Discord community in January. Be sure to keep an eye out for the next one. it’s a great way to get some Alpha and an understanding of some of the points of emphasis happening in the DAO. | Join Marinade Discord

And, pssst, Speaking of Discord, keep an eye out for more community contests in February for the chance to win NFTs and other cool prizes from around the ecosystem.

The Master Chefs and especially builders have been more active on Twitter lately, sharing some snippets about what they’re working on. ICYMI, Master Chef LJ posted this thread highlighting the discrepancies between APY reporting in various stake pools.

And Master Chef MJ gave a little sneak peek into how Marinade is improving governance tooling. Governooors, stay tuned for big updates!