Marinade Kitchen Stories - July 2022

Greetings everyone! It’s the middle of summer, the weather is hot and the barbecue grills fired up. July at Marinade was an eventful one, and for some team members included more travel to Solana Hacker Houses at Paris and then on to Krakow to start August. It’s incredible to think that another Breakpoint Conference in Lisbon is approaching fast in November. Tickets are already now sale and you can be sure the Chefs won’t miss it!

July featured quite a bit of updates, highlighted by the Marinade’s build team, which shipped some great features for users both in DeFi and DAO governance.

Some especially big news was that the first DAO proposal submitted by someone outside the core Marinade Chefs team was voted on and passed! Congratulations to Lifinity on their successful proposal to receive a grant of 2M MNDE to create an mSOL-USDC liquidity pool.Check out what else happened in July and see the latest treasury report in this month’s edition of Kitchen Stories:

Introducing MNDE Liquidity Mining Gauges

The next chapter of gauges is now live! Following the launch of validator gauges, the next installment was activated: liquidity mining gauges.

Originally determined by the core Chefs team since MNDE was minted in October, 2021, in the next step of decentralizing the DAO, that responsibility has been passed on to all Chef NFT holders. There are over two dozen pools you can vote on to receive a share of 1M MNDE rewards. Chefs are welcome to change their votes as much as they wish. Each week, a new snapshot of the gauges will be taken. Right now, Solend is earning the most MNDE rewards weekly, but as more MNDE is added to the gauges, the results are sure to change. | View the current liquidity mining allocations and vote with your Chefs here.

Did you miss the latest Open Kitchen?

Following the midyear review, an Open Kitchen was held featuring many of the Master Chefs, including Repe, Torab, Gekonn, Ricardo, Brandon and of course, the host Seb. The Chefs shared updates on the fee change proposal, partnerships and recapped the first quarter of live on-chain governance for the DAO.

Watch the Open Kitchen in its entirety on YouTube

Marinade Treasury Report: July

On the financial side, July has been an important month for Marinade. With the outcome of the Token Exchange Program that has been finalized in the beginning of the month, it became clear that in order to build a sufficient runway to keep building during the next years, Marinade needs to apply some changes to its fee structure to strive towards a neutral monthly balance between revenues and expenses. This observation led to a forum proposal, currently live on Tribeca. If you’ve missed it, it’s still time to vote!

Expenses for the month of July accounted for $110,367 in USDC, and 637,508 MNDE. Marinade also distributed 4M MNDE for its liquidity mining program, a budget voted on by the DAO, 2M MNDE to Lifinity as a grant to build a mSOL-USDC pool following the successful on-chain vote started by Durden, and 1,220,000 MNDE as part of the Token Exchange Program. Team allocations distributed in NFTs accounted for 2,062,492 MNDE.

On the revenue side, only unstake fees brought in income, accounting for 505 mSOL (or $20,513 in USDC at current prices) as the compensation plan is still active for now. The last transactions from the Token Exchange Program were also realized at the beginning of the month, exchanging the last 1,220,000 MNDE to partners in exchange for USDC and leading to a treasury worth $863,969 at current prices, composed of USDC, mSOL and SLND tokens.

This negative balance situation is expected to be tackled and solved by the proposal mentioned above, so we invite all MNDE holders to take a read through the proposal and cast their votes.

Better Web3 notifications: Dialect integration

One place where web3 stands to greatly improve in its infancy is in notifications. Marinade is pleased to announce its integration with Dialect, which is the first step towards creating a feature that will make sure you never miss an important announcement. Marinade dAPP users can now get a notification when your delayed unstake is ready. Get a notification directly to your wallet, to your email address or to your Telegram account. Just activate the options you want by clicking on the bell and activating each of them.

Marinade is currently reviewing which functions of the website should also have the option to add notifications. If you have a request on how this Dialect integration could be used for your Web3 alerts, feel free to drop them in #suggestion-box and the team will be sure to take a look!

Farewell to two team members

In July Marinade said farewell to two Chefs. Data, Marinade’s community manager, has decided to move on from Marinade and step away from community management to recharge and do some different things. In his brief time here, Data contributed great energy, ideas and engagement, and all of us are sorry to see him go. Marinade also said goodbye to Jesse, who was instrumental in helping make Marinade’s support team one of the most helpful and responsive out there! We will miss Jesse’s commitment and spirit about all things Marinade. However he will be using his tremendous support expertise to build a beginner-friendly RUST developer guide and community within Solana.

Best of luck on your next adventures, Data & Jesse, and please don’t be strangers in the kitchen!

Welcome to the newest Marinade Ambassador

In July, Marinade added a third Ambassador to its lineup. Welcome to SolanaLegend, a top Solana influencer and Twitter account. SolanaLegend shares vast knowledge about Solana DeFi and NFTs and will help share the story of Marinade thru threads and live events and collaboration with team members. Legend joins Knox_Trades and Gaius as official Marinade ambassadors!

Check out Solana Legend’s first thread below:

Introducing Raydium Zaps

The Chefs have been building during July and Marinade released the first iteration of the Zaps!

Zaps are an innovative and easy way for a user providing liquidity to a SOL-XXX pair to instantly move to an equivalent mSOL-XXX pair in order to enjoy the mSOL APY as well as the fees obtained through liquidity providing.

This first integration is with Raydium, on the SOL-USDC, SOL-USDT and SOL-RAY pools. Those Zaps will only display if the expected APY moving to a mSOL pair is higher than the equivalent pair, so any user can safely zap his positions without having to verify if it’s a worthwhile move.

For now, Zaps only cover a small number of pools and one protocol, as this first iteration had the purpose of gauging the interest for this new feature and gathering feedback. If Zaps are widely used and more Chefs think it’s a feature worth iterating on, Marinade will work on adding new DeFi protocols and pools from which you can Zap from, to facilitate the transition to mSOL for everyone in the ecosystem!

In addition to those zaps, Marinade also realized that a lot of users weren’t aware that they could directly deposit an active stake account to Marinade and transform it to mSOL instantly. For this reason, this option was also added as a Zap to put some light on this feature.

Want to see if you have a stake or DeFi position ready to be Zapped? Head to the Marinade DeFi page, connect wallet, and if eligible, a Zap will appear!

Thanks for reading the latest edition of Kitchen Stories! August is setting up to be another big month of DAO governance, shipping updates and much more. The Marinade team is wrapping up planning for numerous big projects in the works are are excited to share them when they are ready to build.

Have a great August, everyone!