Marinade Kitchen Stories - March 2022
It has been more than a month since our last Kitchen updates and we know that you are always curious to learn more about Marinade and the work that is being done in the Kitchen. For this reason, it’s time to dive into what happened this past month!
Hello everyone,
It has been more than a month since our last Kitchen updates and we know that you are always curious to learn more about Marinade and the work that is being done in the Kitchen. For this reason, it’s time to dive into what happened this past month!
But before coming back on the previous month, you may also have a lot of questions regarding the launch of Marinade’s NFT project. As announced by the Chefs on Solana News April 1st, Marinade NFTs will be released on Monday, April 4th. Join the Discord to make sure that you don’t miss any information prior to the launch!
NFT governance and incoming on-chain votes
Thanks to an innovative governance mechanism, you will be able to lock your MNDE for an undefined period of time into a cute Marinade NFT.
A shark NFT grows from Level 1 to Level 5
Those NFTs can be unlocked at any time, leading to a 30-day unlocking period after which you’ll be able to burn your NFT in exchange for the underlying MNDE.
As long as your MNDE is locked in a Marinade NFT, you will have voting power on all the matters regarding Marinade, its treasury and its future.
Marinade NFTs allow your locked MNDE to stay liquid, as you are free to exchange or sell the Marinade NFT directly on the secondary market without burning it. In this case, the person receiving it will get the associated voting power and the possibility to unlock the underlying MNDE for themselves.
This first step towards on-chain governance is making all the Chefs very excited, and we hope you share our excitement and that we’ll see a lot of Marinade profile pictures on social media in the near future!
On the same topic, Marinators will have to make use of their voting power very soon, as there currently are two separate proposals waiting for on-chain governance to be voted on.
The first proposal is brought by GoblinGold and is suggesting a tight partnership in which a GoblinGold’s vault would be put forward on Marinade’s app, simplifying the DeFi experience and offering additional yield on mSOL for users, in exchange for a token allocation and revenue sharing.
The second proposal is about bringing a new utility to MNDE and allow it to control a portion of Marinade’s delegation strategy, where a % of the total stake delegated by Marinade could be directed to specific validators thanks to Tribeca gauges.
We invite you to get familiar with those proposals and use the forum to share your opinion before those proposals are opened to an on-chain vote.
Token exchange program
Another thing that Chefs have worked on this past month is the Token Exchange program, detailed in the article released yesterday.
You may not know it, but Marinade’s treasury is public. In addition to this treasury, Marinade’s multisig also controls a part of the MNDE treasury before the DAO takes control of it via on-chain governance. You can read more on the current tokenomics of MNDE in the documentation, but MNDE holders will have the power to switch things up in the future.
Out of the 300,000,000 MNDE previously dedicated to Liquidity Mining incentives (from which approximately 52M have already been distributed), it was highlighted in this article that it would be more beneficial for Marinade to transform this budget into an Ecosystem budget.
As one of the main challenges of Marinade in 2022 is to decentralize itself, it made sense to allocate a part of those MNDE (100M MNDE) in a fair and open Token Exchange program that would allow in the first place the distribution of MNDE to interested users and key players of the ecosystem, and in a second place would allow a diversification of the Marinade treasury, making it able to last through any eventual crypto winter. This way, Marinade ensures that majority of tokens in circulation will stay in the hands of key players in the Solana industry. That ensures proper democratic governance and prevents a majority of tokens to be bought by one big player.
The Token Exchange program will take place in the next months and a part of it will be open and permissionless, so any user is free to participate. Another round will take place with other participants (Market makers, validators, protocols, influencers, early investors of Solana, etc.) that will be vetted, whitelisted and publicly announced. They will have to state what they bring to the Marinade DAO to be able to participate in it. They will also commit to join Marinade for the long run and bring value to the protocol.
Financial overview — March
As of April 1, 2022, Marinade holds in its treasury a bundle of mSOL, MNDE, and USDC accounting for $650,000 (at current prices), split in different liquidity pools, lending protocols or kept to deal with expenses. This treasury is filled every month by the fees generated by Marinade, but also can access the DAO treasury allocation (35%) that can be used by the team and MNDE holders for operations, grant programs, strategic partnerships, etc.
MNDE holders on their side will also have their say in the distribution of the Ecosystem budget, representing 35% of the total supply (350,000,000 MNDE), of which 52,000,000 MNDE have already been distributed through Liquidity Mining and Milestone bonuses, and 100M have been allocated to the Token Exchange Program. They will also be able to suggest the unlock of funds from the DAO treasury mentioned in the first paragraph to bootstrap projects or initiatives that they feel are needed, through on-chain voting.
For the month of March, Marinade monthly expenses were $118,691, or approximately 929 mSOL at current prices. $28,040 were also used in MNDE (unlocked by the executive team from the operational DAO treasury) in order to pay for services, marketing and external contributions.
For the same month, management fees for the delegated SOL to Marinade and instant unstake fees brought in 690 mSOL, or $88,119 at current prices.
Resulting in a net negative of 239 mSOL for the month of March, or approximately $30k at current prices. This represents around 4.5% of the existing treasury, which was able to easily cover for the missing revenues.
It can also be noted that monthly revenues for February were 1,180 mSOL for approximately the same expenses, leading to a positive cashflow for February. As we can see, monthly results are dependent on market activity, and also on mSOL price, which confirms the need for Marinade to grow its TVL, diversify its treasury and prepare for all scenarios.
On the same topic, Marinade is currently working on a financial dashboard that will be accessible to all, allowing MNDE holders and users to quickly have all the financial data regarding Marinade at their disposal.
Transparency is of the upmost importance for Marinade and for crypto in general, and setting high standards as soon as possible is an objective of Marinade. We hope that thanks to this financial data, investors can make more informed decisions when deciding to stake with Marinade or invest in MNDE.
Unstake Incident and Compensation Plan
For those of you that missed it, during epoch 284, a cascade of events led to the unstake of most of the SOL delegated to Marinade. No funds were ever in jeopardy of being lost, but this event led to missing approximately 1 epoch of rewards.
This event resulted in the mSOL price not going up as much at it should have after epoch 285. You can consult the incident report published in Marinade’s changelog for more details.
As announced in the Discord shortly after the incident, the Chefs have been working on a plan that would allow mSOL holders to be fairly compensated for this missed epoch.
Because such a plan affects all MNDE holders, as they now govern and control Marinade, a suggested plan will be posted on the forum and will need to be voted on by MNDE holders in the near future. It is not possible to give an exact date for now, as models are currently being built in order to plan for a fair compensation which requires deliberation, but please note that a final resolution is being worked on.
This compensation plan will certainly affect the revenue stream of Marinade, but calculations will be done to ensure a balance that allows a fair compensation to mSOL holders and the Chefs team to keep on working on Marinade products without endangering the financial stability of the DAO.
App and website updates
Marinade’s homepage
This last month, Chefs have shipped and planned a number of small improvements on the Marinade landing page and app.
Discover a new homepage with an easier access to Marinade’s external links. In the near future, new pages will appear to give you information and educational content about Marinade’s ecosystem.
On the app, you may have noticed a new indicator when Solana is experiencing poor performance (even if we hope you didn’t!) We are also close to releasing a new layout of the DeFi page to facilitate your DeFi exploration!
You may also have noticed the new illustrated modals when staking or unstaking on Marinade, designed to facilitate and enhance the user experience.
Finally, you can expect the MNDE page in the app to change a bit to integrate the ‘Lock MNDE’ functionality, with the mSOL and mSOL-SOL pools moved onto the DeFi page.
Community events & re-structuring
With the upcoming governance launch, our community has been more active than ever!
If you wandered into Marinade’s Discord recently, you may have seen dozens of meals concocted by community members to participate in our Food corner challenge, where you only had to share your meal every day in order to be eligible to win a prize of 1 mSOL! This contest ended very recently and was won by ‘Degen G’ with a tasty Creamy Mustard Chicken! If you want the recipe, it’s been shared on our Discord!
Another contest where Marinators were able to display their creativity also took place in the #memes channel, and it’s an understatement to say that Marinade has some good Somemeliers!
Another thing that was implemented was the Community Committee, composed by members of our community that wants to share their opinion on events and community-related decisions. In the future, they will lead and organize community-related events and projects, directly impacting Marinade and being rewarded for it.
They are joined by another part of our community, the Somemeliers, who produce memes and content about Marinade that will spread the liquid staking word everywhere and bring people to the kitchen!
Finally, with the upcoming launch of Marinade NFTs, the ‘GM for coffee’ event is back in our Discord! Greet your fellow marinators with a ‘gm’ and be eligible for a daily prize in USDC during all of April!
Partners & Chefs AMAs
You may also have seen our Chefs talking about Marinade and the NFT project on external platforms, such as Twitter spaces (with Orca or @analyticalali for example) or even on multi-platforms stream (with our friends from Grape).
If you missed it, the last Open Kitchen is also available on Youtube, as well as the AMAs with Hubble Protocol and Step.Finance.
You can also find an awesome video going through the NFT project on Marinade’s Twitter and YouTube, narrated by our amazing designer Elli.
Partnerships and mSOL ecosystem
One of the strengths of mSOL and Marinade is its deep integration into the whole Solana ecosystem. Out of the 30 biggest protocols on Solana, Marinade is available in 26 of them. One of the last missing pieces for mSOL use is the NFT’s secondary market, and the Chefs are working hard to close this gap.
Via Marinade’s NFT project and the work of our partnership team, we are hoping to see more and more collections and marketplaces accepting mSOL as a payment mean. The choice will often fall to the NFT projects to decide to mint in mSOL or accept it on secondary markets, but we are also doing our best to convince marketplaces that it would be a great idea!
On the DeFi side, Aldrin and Delchain and the NFT project Grim Syndicate have joined our referral program and will benefit from a part of the fees generated by the users they direct to mSOL. If you want your favorite protocol to integrate liquid staking, let them know about it! Marinade’s referral program is open to everyone.
Slope wallet also recently announced the native integration of mSOL staking in their wallet, following the path of SolFlare! We are honored by the trust those wallets put in Marinade and hope that it will lead to an even more massive adoption of mSOL across Solana.
Marinade is also trying to get closer to custodial staking services (whether they are companies, exchanges, etc.) and invite them to use mSOL instead of staking to their own validator or to single validators. This would allow them to look for additional yield for their users while also growing the Marinade TVL and help decentralize the network and make it more censorship-resistant.
Finally, Marinade is working with big NFT DAOs and inviting them to stake their treasury to mSOL, as a lot of NFTs projects did already! We hope that mSOL can be a unification factor across the whole Solana ecosystem and that everyone takes advantage of the possibilities offered by liquid staking in the future.
Stake through Marinade in DAO’s Realms
Realms DAOs homepage
If you are a member of a DAO that uses SPL governance tools, you way be familiar with Realms, a governance interface that can be used by DAOs in the Solana ecosystem to control their treasury and programs.
Thanks to a collaboration between Marinade and the SPL governance team, it is now possible to use a pre-written proposal that will allow you to suggest to the DAO to Stake SOL through Marinade directly!
If you’re curious on how to do it or want to create this proposal for your own DAO as soon as possible, you can check out the documentation! It was made extremely easy and Marinade is honored to have this opportunity offered to all the DAOs using Realms.
To conclude, I’d like to add that a lot is happening in the back of the Kitchen to keep shipping products, partnerships and events in this second quarter of 2022 with the same energy as in the first one. Chefs are committed to their objectives for 2022 and open to any feedback you may have. If you want to get involved, learn more or even share words of encouragement, you will always be welcomed on Marinade’s Discord. As on-chain governance is rolling out, this is probably the best time to remind everyone that YOU are all Marinade. The common goal we all share and the DAO structure is meant to allow everyone to participate, improve and lead Marinade towards its objectives.
About Marinade
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 your stake account.
Marinade’s delegation strategy stakes to 400+ validators that are selected automatically by an open-source, fair formula based on performance, commission, and decentralization.
