Marinade Kitchen Stories - September 2023
Read the summary of what happened in the kitchen during the month of September!
Greetings Chefs! Marinade ended the month of September approaching an all-time high in TVL that was quickly achieved in the early days of October. As we turn the page to the fourth quarter, Marinade is preparing its goals for the quarter, which include further improvements to the delegation strategy and smart contract for even better performance and decentralization.
Leading up to Breakpoint, Marinade’s core team has been preparing thought leadership topics and participating in many AMAs and podcasts (see links below). They have also been collaborating with teams to further integrate Marinade Native and mSOL liquid staking into protocols, wallets and other applications in the ecosystem. A full summer of promoting Marinade’s unique optimized staking value proposition, either through native or liquid staking, is taking hold.
Marinade’s September was full of shipping and excitement for its new incentives campaign. Check out the latest monthly recap:
Marinade Earn Season 1 kicks off
Marinade Earn Season officially kicked off on October 1st. This is a first-of-its-kind campaign that is rewarding stakers equally whether they are large or small holders. All stakers receive the same 1:1 SOL/MNDE ratio, so rewards will not be diluted by whales. There is a 40M MNDE cap on this program.
At the end of the Earn season in January, stakers will be able to claim the MNDE in the form of locked MNDE.
In the weeks leading up to the Earn Season, Marinade revealed its referral program for Marinade Native. This program enables referreres to earn 1 MNDE per SOL staked by their referee (who also earn 1 MNDE per SOL staked). There is no other way currently for Solana stakers to earn governance tokens on their native stake. It’s not too late to create a referral link and share it with your communities for Marinade Native.
Marinade is committed to distributing MNDE primarily through contributions to the DAO via TVL or other work provided (such as through grants). Do you already have Marinade stake? You’re automatically earning MNDE. Connect to the Marinade Earn page to see how much you’ve earned so far.
dApp and homepage get a fresh look
If you’ve been to Marinade.finance lately you’ve encountered a brand new landing page. Now that Marinade has both liquid and Native stake options, the messaging and branding needed to change. Marinade spent considerable time working on this all-new landing page that tells the Marinade story of “optimized” staking rather than the original “liquid staking” message.
The latest addition to the homepage is a brand new video telling the story in 60 seconds of Marinade’s value proposition to users and the Solana overall. Be sure to check it out either on the homepage, YouTube or Twitter and be sure to share with your friends curious about the value proposition of staking to 100+ validators with Marinade!
Add mSOL easily with the terminal widget
Earlier this year, the Solend protocol introduced a new feature on their site that instantly detects staked SOL and prompts the user to convert it to mSOL to be used on Solend and throughout Solana DeFi. This was a great feature and the Marinade Grant Committee asked Solend to create one in open-sourced fashion that any project in the ecosystem can use by simply installing a few lines of code.
The Marinade Terminal is now complete, and devs can access the widget via Marinade’s Github repository in this link.
Projects should keep in mind that Marinade’s Open Doors Program is currently ongoing so protocols can earn MNDE by driving TVL to Marinade. The widget can also be set to direct stake to the validator of the protocol’s choice.
Treasury Report
Marinade ended the month of September with a TVL of 7.963M SOL staked combined between mSOL and Native. This was 10.65% growth MoM. Revenues were 1,709 mSOL ($37,701 USD), down 14% MoM due to 1M SOL being moved from mSOL to Marinade Native. Total team expenses for the month were $104,247 (+2.98%), $46,495 of which was paid using MNDE from the team’s milestone budget (37.1M MNDE was left in the 8M milestone budget). View DeFi wallet | Treasury wallet
AMAs and Podcasts
Marinade has been a guest of, and has been hosting podcasts and AMAs in a big way lately. Tuning in is a great way to see what’s happening in the space and how leading builders are thinking about what’s next on Solana.
Marinade was asked to join the latest DeFi Ring to discuss the state of DAOs with other leading DAOs like MonkeDAO, LamportDAO, Helium and Mango. It was a jampacked hour that will probably warrant a Part II very soon.
More discussions in the DAO space have been taking place. Cerba joined the Realms DAO team to discuss the future of Solana governance in this fun conversation.
Marinade and Meteora also held a Spaces that covered a lot of topics regarding Solana LSTs and DeFi. Meteora’s Ben Chow explained the very unique value prop of supplying mSOL to Meteora. Not only is it supplied as liquidity, but when it is not used as liquidity it is automatically supplied to lending protocols to earn fees that way. Only Possible on Solana!
Step Finance validator swaps to mSOL Directed Stake
One of the podcasts in posted in September were with Marinade’s Repe and Step Finance’s founder George Harrap on The Next Billion. Clips of the pod have been shared all over social media.
But follow-up conversations following the podcast led to Step, which operates a top validator on Solana, choosing to direct its self-stake to its node using mSOL instead of self-staking to their node natively. This enabled Step to actually receive more SOL to their node than if they would have self-staked (670k stake off 399k SOL), because the ratio in the directed stake pool is about 1.6 SOL per SOL staked. It also makes their stake liquid so they can explore DeFi opportunities across Solana.
Any validators who are similarly curious about whether Directed Stake using mSOL or MNDE is a better option than self-staking should get in touch with a Marinade Chef to run the numbers.
Keep in mind that as Marinade Native continues to grow, it means more SOL in the overall pool will be available for MNDE and mSOL Directed Stake, which make up 40% of the delegation strategy.
Solana Hub builds Directed Stake Dashboard
Speaking of Directed Stake, Solana Hub validator (formerly named Avaulto) recently completed a grant for Marinade that shares a detailed breakdown of MNDE and mSOL Directed Stake. This is particularly valuable since Marinade moved to Realms as there is no dashboard there yet that shows the votes. Now with the dashboard you can filter and sort by validators receiving Marinade SOL via Directed Stake, and it’s broken down to the wallet addresses and amount directed. You can view it here.
