Marinade Kitchen Stories - September 2022
Read more about what happened in the Kitchen during the month of September!
September will go down as a milestone month in the early history of the Marinade kitchen. It was a month in which community DAO governance took center stage and drove significant discussion and awareness to Marinade. It ultimately ended with two completed on-chain votes that would impact the future of the DAO.
“Governance Week”, as it soon became known as in the kitchen, is the lead item in this month’s kitchen stories. Pull up a chair, grab a napkin and let’s dig in!
Governance week: mDAO’s landmark votes
From the time on-chain governance was officially launched at Marinade in April up until early September, each of the proposals voted on-chain were all lopsided in favor of support. Each was discussed at length by the DAO on the forum and brought to a vote only when there appeared to be pretty strong consensus in the kitchen it would pass. This included two votes in September, the installation of a grant committee as well as a marketing budget.
Then, proposals 16 & 17 came on chain and represented two community proposals that attracted considerable attention and discussion from the ecosystem.
It began with a forum post by ‘Crypto Batman’ proposing the mDAO no longer supports “closed” pools in their liquidity mining gauges. This directed impacted Lifinity, which has MNDE thanks to its own AMM grant proposal, and was reinvesting their rewards back into their gauge.
The discussion drew heated debate with over 190 replies on the forum as well as considerable back-and-forth in the Discord and even spilling onto Twitter.
During this week, the mDAO drew considerable interest from other Solana protocols and investors at large. It was during this time that the mDAO crossed the 100M locked MNDE threshold (over 60% of the total supply). Through discussion with Solend’s Soju and others, Durden proposed making the mSOL-USDC pool open to the public, which was installed by Lifinity within days and appeared to please many Chef NFT holders (including Solend, which would ultimately contribute liqudiity to the pool).
Proposals 16 and 17 received a record amount of MNDE used to vote. Proposal 16, banning all current closed pools in the liquidity mining gauges and requiring them to resubmit, did not pass. Proposal 17, submitted by mDAO member and Lifinity representative Durden that bans future closed pools in the gauges, passed.
One of Marinade’s key goals in 2022 was to decentralize the DAO, and Governance Week proved to be the first example of community-driven governance. There are takeaways and lessons learned, such as how to help facilitate properly worded on-chain proposals, and also ensuring Discord and the mDAO forum remain civil, welcome all good-faith discussion, and remain constructive.
What to vote on next? Well, it’s of course up to anyone in the mDAO to submit a proposal on chain. But keep an eye out for two items in particular already on the forum that have high implications for Marinade: Validator’s stake as collateral product, and a vote on whether to raise the validator gauges to 20%.
Introducing … Liquid unstake from any validator!
The Master Chefs weren’t just governooors in September, but shipooors, too. The biggest highlight of the month was the introduction of the new Liquid Unstake feature on the Marinade DApp.
With Liquid Unstake, anyone can unstake from any validator immediately. Marinade takes your SOL stake, instantly converts it to mSOL and then unstakes it from its liquidity pool.
Before you unstake keep in mind that:
Read more about Liquid Unstake in the blog announcement, and keep this feature in mind the next time you desperately need SOL and can’t wait for the cooldown period.
Frakt stakes with Marinade
Marinade has been closely connected with the emerging NFT community on Solana for nearly a year now, when the first NFT projects began staking their treasuries with Marinade. Add Frakt to the growing list. Frakt, an exciting NFT lending and liquidity platform on Solana, announced to its community they would stake 1000 SOL for mSOL with Marinade. In a Twitter spaces, the Frakt team indicated they would be conservative with the mSOL and determine how to use it in DeFi by discussing it with their community.
Thanks to Frakt for decentralizing Solana and enabling DeFi prosperity by staking SOL for mSOL!
Marinade September Treasury Report
September has been the first month where the recent fee structure update has been applied throughout the whole month. This led to improved revenues for Marinade, with a monthly income of 2,096 mSOL (approximately 73,000 USDC at current prices). 1976 mSOL coming from management fees, and 119 mSOL from liquid unstake operations.
In terms of expenses, USDC expenses represented $95,879, leading to a USDC balance of -$22,875 for September. In addition to that, Marinade used 1,055,854 MNDE from the treasury to pay for contributors and services.
Team allocations have represented an emission of 4,458,281 MNDE, added to the stable Liquidity Mining emissions of 4,000,000 MNDE per month.
Introducing: The Cookbook
It’s a story as old as liquid staking on Solana itself: Now that I have mSOL, what should I do with it?
Marinade is pleased to introduce The Cookbook, an educational resource that shares the strategies and protocols that offer DeFi opportunities with mSOL. This ranges from liquidity pools to lending, collateral, staking and even leveraged yield farming. The Master Chefs have separated them by strategy type and even included color-coded peppers to indicate how much risk is associated with each strategy.
The Cookbook is designed to help introduce popular and new DeFi strategies using mSOL to the community. A new public Discord channel, msol-strategies, has also been created where anyone can come ask questions about mSOL. Stop by Marinade Discord and chat mSOL!
Speaking of strategies, Kamino Finance, a brand new Solana automated vaults protocol, just added a mSOL-USDH vault. Time to update the cookbook!
Wallets, wallets and more wallets integrated!
The devs have been doing their best to keep up with the rapidly evolving and growing wallets landscape in Web3. What began with Marinade integrating Solana-native wallets has turned into a long list of multi-chain and institutional wallets integrating with Marinade and some even offering the Marinade DApp directly within their interface! Wallets added in September include: Coinbase wallet, Brave wallet , XDEFI Wallet and Strike Wallet
Speaking of wallets, a gentle remindooor that all things marinade can be accessed via your Ledger wallet. Check out this new Ledger wallet guide on how to use Ledger to stake for mSOL, mint NFTs and more.
Team updates
In September, we said goodbye to Torab, head of partnerships at Marinade. Torab has been with Marinade for much of 2022, and you likely saw or heard him on AMAs, Open Kitchens and at Hacker Houses or other Web3 events. We thank Torab for all his contributions to Marinade and wish him the best on his next step.
With October upon us, you know that the big item on the fall Solana schedule is in November at Breakpoint in Lisbon, Portugal. The Chefs can’t wait to go and are even planning quite a bit of swag. If you’re headed to Breakpoint be sure to let the Chefs know so they can be sure to save you some swag!
