Ordering off the best menu on Solana

We get it. You must be quite hungry by now. We’ve been promising the launch of liquid staking for Solana on Mainnet since March.

And we could have taken the easy path. You know the drill: raise money from investors, hire a marketing agency or bunch of influencers to create the buzz, maybe even launch a token and sell it through IDO at zillion-dollar valuation and ride along the crypto enthusiasm wave while having no real product to show just yet.

But we went a different route: we have not raised ANY money from investors and are self-funded with a help from the ecosystem grants awarded to us by Solana and Serum.

This helped us to stay laser focused on product development and in a close loop with our small but active community. We delivered a fully functional devnet version of liquid staking. The community around Marinade is built organically out of people who really care about what we’re after. And you’ll find out soon why this plays a central part in our future steps.

All in all, we chose the hard way and only time and you, the community, will tell if this was just another hare-brained idea or if this can actually work.

To the fun part: we’re about to launch on Mainnet

On one side we wanted to please the “wen SOL staking” people and launch as soon as possible.

On the other hand, we’re serious about the system security (and talking to peer reviewers, auditors and ecosystem projects, we’ve been told many times we’re maybe too diligent).

The time has come we’re confident to launch. So here’s the 3-course menu we’re about to serve:

1. Appetizer

Starting with the obvious, SOL liquid staking. This first phase is the invitation to join the table at Marinade and start staking with us (or deposit existing stake account) and receive marinated tokens (mSOL) representing your stake position and increasing in value reflecting staking rewards.

Initially, we’ll put a limit on how much SOL can we stake in total on a first come first served basis.

Having mSOL you can swap back to SOL anytime you want skipping the usual 3-day lockup period.

While not intending to sound like a telesales guy…but wait! There’s more!

2. Main Course

Owning mSOL not only allows you to make your stake position liquid any time you want (and skip warmup and cooldown periods), but it also serves as a proof you’re now part of a very good company of people using Marinade.

And that, at least to us, is a big deal!

That’s why we plan to form a Marinade DAO around mSOL holders. We’ll reveal the exact rules when the day comes, but for now let’s just keep in mind you will be able to use your mSOL tokens to become part of Marinade. And to generate an extra (second) layer of benefit for you— we aim to distribute the governance tokens to early adopters with a fair mechanism to be revealed later on.

Sounds good so far? I hope you’re not full yet. There’s always room for a dessert!

3. Dessert(s)

So you’re already getting staking rewards in form of mSOL and increasing your position in Marinade.

What else is there to come?

Let’s not forget about the main promise of liquid staking — unlocking the staked assets. We’re in touch with the main projects of Solana ecosystem and plan to make it super easy to integrate. All to make sure you can put a third layer of the yield on top and participate in the Solana DeFi world.

So now you know the launch roadmap!

It all starts by serving the appetizer — in steps

In the coming days, Marinade starts in the mainnet beta mode. It means that we will only accept SOL stake orders until the maximum limit is reached. In other words, we put a cap on the amount of total SOL that could be staked with us.

 Get ready: The initial cap on total SOL staked with @MarinadeFinance on mainnet will be 100K SOL. (🐦 TWEET IT)

This is to help us check everything works fine with smaller numbers first. Once we’re confident we may increase the total SOL staked cap to let more people in.

To know the exact time we’re about to serve the appetizer (liquid staking for Solana on mainnet), follow us on Twitter and join our Discord.

We plan to reward early adopters who get the appetizer by giving them access to the main course once it’s ready.

 All we can say is that it’s worth it to squeeze yourself in before the total stake limit is reached.

How to stake your SOL with Marinade

There are 2 ways how to stake SOL with Marinade:

Stake SOL

Deposit stake account

For both options, once you’re done don’t forget to pat yourself on your back because you just liquid staked your SOL with Marinade!

A big Thank You

Finally, we wanted to pause and say thanks to all the people involved with Marinade in the past months that made it happen, we finally launched on mainnet.

We’re very honored to be part of such an amazing and vibrant Solana community!

Being awarded Serum EcoSystem grant and Solana foundation grant not only validated our initial idea, but also helped a lot in building Marinade all this time without any VC money.

Now is about time we give back. Stay tuned for next updates and see you on mainnet!

About Marinade Finance

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 the underlying staked SOL.

Marinade’s liquid staking stakes in 400+ validators that are selected automatically by an open-source, fair formula based on performance, commission, and decentralization.

Marinade includes mSOL->SOL swap, so you can “Unstake Now!” and receive your SOL immediately with a small fee. You can also directly exchange between mSOL and SOL on secondary markets at the current rate. Finally, you can unstake your SOL with zero fee by waiting 4–6 days for the Solana cool-down period (delayed unstake).