Marinade Kitchen Stories

Hello everyone, this month’s kitchen stories are a few days delayed due to the team’s visit to Breakpoint, combined with the FTX-Alameda news. But we’re back and recapping a very eventful month of October that brought many milestones to the mDAO.

Of course, the big news around Solana is the demise of FTX and Alameda Research. While Marinade didn’t have any direct exposure to FTX, and the relationship with Alameda has been minimal in 2022, the impact on the ecosystem is nevertheless being felt. To read the Marinade retrospective in detail, read our latest article here.

In early November, Marinade attended the annual Solana Breakpoint conference in Lisbon, as well as the MEV Camp and staking conference hosted by Staking Rewards. Nearly everyone from Marinade attended at least one of these events and the chance to catch up with everyone in the ecosystem was priceless. Despite the market downturn, this year’s Breakpoint was twice as large as 2021 and involved teams both institutional and independent, large and small. All are committed to the ecosystem and contributing critical pieces to the infrastructure as well as onboard more mainstream people to DeFi and Web3.

At MEV Camp, Marinade presented its mTransactions product that was released earlier in November. Network performance is poised to improve heading into 2023 and updates to Solana will enable even more opportunities for validators and stakers through priority transactions.

Marinade and its value proposition were also featured in numerous presentations and new products, from Solana Labs’ realms governance tooling to Solana mobile and the State of Decentralization.

mSOL first liquid staking token listed on Coinbase

Marinade’s mSOL and MNDE tokens are officially live on Coinbase! Coinbase completed the integration on October 2-. Especially notable is that mSOL is the first ever non-native liquid staking token on the exchange — for any chain! Not only is mSOL’s APY higher (6.63%) than Coinbase’s native staking SOL feature (4%), mSOL is also permissionless and can be self-custodied on a hardware wallet like Ledger.

Coinbase enables on- and off-ramps to Solana DeFi, using their Coinbase Wallet or any other wallets that support SPL tokens.

MNDE, the governance token, is also now tradable on Coinbase, helping enable much higher trading volume and lower slippage for larger trades. You can of course still use Solana DeFi for mSOL and MNDE swapping via Orca, Raydium or go thru Jupiter aggregator to view rates.

Liquid Self-stake

Marinade has teamed up with Solend to offer a brand-new product designed at bringing more liquidity to the Solana DeFi ecosystem: Liquid Self-Stake! This product enables validators to supply their self-staked SOL to Marinade, keep at least a portion of this stake on their validator, and receive mSOL to use in DeFi. Staking Facilities is the first validator to utilize this service and Marinade follow up with them soon to see how their mSOL is performing in DeFi vs. their traditional SOL stake.

Read more about the Liquid Self-Stake product on the blog.

Introducing the Sharks NFT

Marinade’s limited edition Octopus NFTs are officially minted out, which makes way for Marinade’s latest collection, The Sharks! The Sharks work the same in mDAO governance as the Octopus and MNDE locked into Sharks carry the same weight as Octopus NFTs. The only difference is the supply. There are only 3,333 Octopus NFTs minted, while there is a much larger supply of potential sharks (over 2 million rarity traits!). Do you have a Shark? Be sure to share it in the Chef-NFT-Flex channel in Discord. Read more about the inspiration behind the Shark collection here.

The latest in mDAO Governance

October was a big month for mDAO governance votes. Here’s a quick recap in case you missed any votes.

Validator gauges: The mDAO voted to raise the percentage of the gauges stake in the Marinade pool to 20%. It is currently in the middle of a 15% pilot for 10 epochs before it moves to 20% assuming the protocol continues performing as anticipated.

Grant Committee: Dobby from Flipside governance has been elected as the community member of the mDAO’s grant committee, joining Master Chefs btuck and Lucio. Their first piece of work is approving a grant to build a growth dashboard. After receiving numerous candidates they have selected community member k2rbpz to complete the work for the grant.

Lifinity gauge: The mDAO voted to remove the Lifinity gauge from the MNDE liquidity mining gauges. (The mDAO is also working to clean out other gauges that are not receiving more than .05% of gauges stake, as well as the soBTC-mSOL pool due to losing peg).

Watch Marinade’s first feature video

Earlier this summer the Chefs met up in Italy for a retreat and brought a videographer along for the experience. It was a great opportunity to shoot a video about what Marinade is all about. This feature provides a never-before-seen glimpse into the Marinade kitchen and shows what we stand for: a community-owned protocol working on decentralization and opportunity for all.

Marinade launches new referral program

Marinade is pleased to announce an all-new referral program and invites anyone in the community to apply to use it. This program enables partners to promote liquid staking mSOL to their audience. They can customize referral fees and it is all automatically paid out to their account. Partners can earn up to 0.5% commission on three operations: stake, deposit stake account, and instant unstake.

The new Marinade Referral Program is designed to help evangelize mSOL to communities throughout the ecosystem and can be installed easily on any website or social media.

Check out how the referral program looks in this example with program partner Port Finance: Want to get a code for your project or social? Fill out this form.

Marinade’s latest Treasury report

Prior to the FTX collapse, the month of October had shown promising results for Marinade finances with revenue approaching break-even in terms of the denomination in USDC.

During the month of October, Marinade had accumulated 2,171.5 mSOL through management fees and 119.26 mSOL through unstake fees, for a total of 2,291 mSOL (the equivalent of 80,311 USDC on November 1st).

In terms of expenses, Marinade spent 85,431 USDC and 811,242 MNDE (equivalent to 42,996 USDC) for a total of $128,427 in terms of USDC. The overall balance was -$5,120 in terms of USDC, and -$48,116 accounting for the MNDE expenses.

Allocations for the team accounted for 4,255,943 MNDE. The “Do not distribute” gauge added recently to the Liquidity mining gauges reduced the emissions of MNDE by approximately 1,988,000 MNDE for the month, leading to total emissions of approximately 2,583,000 MNDE for the month of October, almost dividing by 2 the number of MNDE allocated to Liquidity mining for the month.

Because Marinade gets its revenue in SOL, the drop in price has had an effect on Marinade’s long-term runway for contributors. The core team is looking at funding options, from grants to ecosystem investment via another Token Exchange round.

Marinade self custodies its treasury with a 7-wallet multisig and had no funds stored on FTX. All funds held by Marinade are stored on-chain and are available at these addresses: DeFi | MNDE

Farewell to Elli & c2ptic

Marinade DAO said goodbye two full-time contributors goodbye in October. c2yptic and Elli joined the DAO in 2021 and were instrumental in growing the community and brand into what it is today. Seb was the community manager and spokesperson in many AMAs and Spaces, and helped make Marinade’s discord the vibrant and friendly place it is today. Elli joined during Breakpoint in 2021 and helped transform the brand, redesign the website and was the designer behind the Chef NFT Octopus and Sharks. Both c2pytic and Elli are remaining in the ecosystem working on new projects.

Everyone at Marinade miss working with both of them every day but are excited to see where our paths cross next!