Marinade Kitchen Stories

Just like that, Q1 of 2023 is in the books and we’re into the middle of spring. Marinade spent much of the quarter planting seeds across Solana DeFi and governance that will hopefully bear fruit in the coming months.

The protocol continued to receive plenty of activity that helped enable liquidity in the ecosystem. Marinade drove 28,783 SOL worth of total rewards. Of this, an estimated 2,500 in SOL rewards were collected by validators. The liquidity pool generated 610 SOL fees and this is split between Marinade and liquidity providers.

Here is a roundup of some highlights from the month of March, a month in which Solana had its 3-year anniversary of going live, and Marinade celebrated its 600th day of being on mainnet.

Brand new Delegation Strategy

The biggest news for the month of March was the installation of the Marinade stake pool’s all-new delegation strategy.Not only is performance expected to improve over time because of this strategy, but another key benefit is due to the simplicity, it is enabling Marinade to be even more transparent than ever before when it comes to how and where stake is being distributed. Several items shipped since the strategy took effect:

Stake Pool Reports: Starting from Epoch 428 you can view and download detailed reports about Marinade’s allocation and performance.

Staking estimates: See which validators are receiving or losing Marinade stake at the next epoch.

While the new strategy delegates to fewer overall validators (100 vs. 400+), keep in mind that if Marinade receives more SOL in the pool, the strategy can be easily adjusted to delegate SOL to more validators.

More Solana DeFi and staking education

Marinade has been working on continued education about liquid staking, DeFi, and governance. You can check out the latest videos we’ve shared across social media by visiting the YouTube channel, and also keep an eye out for these videos, infographics and articles across Twitter and even on third-party sites and in our DApp.

Marinade also recently updated The Cookbook, an educational resource for how mSOL works in DeFi, and now reflects the growing number of ways mSOL can be used in the Solana ecosystem. Thanks in part to integrations from protocols like Hadeswap, Rain.Fi and Liquify, mSOL is becoming a growing use case for NFT users on Solana in addition to DeFi.

Considering even Chat GPT is getting liquid staking questions dead wrong, it’s clear there is a lot of work to do with education. There are more videos coming as well as a broader strategy involving educational content to help onboard Solana users to mSOL and liquid staking, and even Marinade governance. We will even engage the community and give them a chance to win more prizes via Kitchen Rewards. So stay tuned!

Monthly Treasury report

In March, Marinade’s TVL grew slightly to 6.253M SOL. Revenue was up MoM at 1,714 mSOL (+35.6%) to $38,764 (+20.6%).

The team continues to manage and reduce expenses and has moved several contributors from full-time into on-demand roles. Liquidity mining for the month was 259,585 MNDE and team expenses was down 22.5% MoM to $90.948. The team was compensated $37,448 in $USDC and the remainder in MNDE (1.096M). This MNDE is taken out of the milestones budget articulated in this prior blog post, and the new balance is 41M out of an initial 46M for the first milestone.

The treasury balance by the end of the month is $200,119 USDC, 505,115 SLND and 4,203 mSOL). View Marinade’s wallets anytime at these dashboards: DeFi | Treasury

New Stake Pool APY tooling available

APYs are a big deal in crypto, but it’s come to many users’ attention they can be outdated, inconsistent and inaccurate. That’s been especially true with stake pool performance, where it’s been difficult to get a unified reporting measure across all protocols. To combat this, Marinade build a public good available for any protocol to install that includes APYs for the top Solana stakepools, measured in a consistent and on-chain way. If you’d like to use it, you can find it in the Marinade github repo:

Speaking of APYs, you can also try out the Staking Rewards simulator on the DApp. Not sure how much SOL you can earn over time? Plug in some numbers and give it a shot!

Chefs and Solana Hacker Houses

Development across the ecosystem continues at a torrid pace. We’ve seen this with the recent activity around various hackathons, including Grizzlython which brought in 813 submissions. Hacker House szn is already upon us, and several Marinade devs were able to fit a visit to the Ho Chi Minh City Hacker House in Viet Nam.

Marinade will also have a representative at the Austin Hacker House. If you’ll be there, let’s connect!

SuperStake — mSOL Lending

DeFi progress continued on Solana in March as new and existing protocols work to shore up their LTV parameters and attract liquidity back to the ecosystem. We’re already beginning to see TVL rise once more. Solend plans to relaunch their v2 very soon, enabling mSOL lend-borrow once again. Another lending protocol, MarginFi, is now live and offers lending with mSOL. In fact, they are preparing to release “SuperStake” — this is a one-click method of the popular “looping” strategy that leverages your liquid stake through repeated borrow-lend. Keep an eye out for an announcement when the product is officially live. You can learn more about MarginFi in the spaces we recently held with them where we learned about their DeFi roadmap, superstake details and more.

Lastly, the kitchen had some personnel updates in March in order to continue streamlining and focusing on the core Marinade goals. mDAO said goodbye to regular contributors Spaceman, Georonimo, JJ, Enthusiast, Copycat, and Ciccio. Devs Lucio and Roman are also reducing their time to on-demand, and all these great Master Chefs will still be welcome around the Discord. Thanks so much for all your contributions everyone!

That’s it for the March highlights. April is already underway and the team is building many different items and collaborating with leading projects across the space to continue Open Doors Program and prepare some exciting items to ship that are possible only on Solana. Thanks for reading everyone and we hope to see you at a Hacker House or around the various ecosystem communities.