What a launch!

On the 2nd of August 2021, we pressed the button and launched Marinade, the liquid staking for Solana, on mainnet. To take it slow, at least that was a plan, we started with an initial cap of a maximum of 100,000 SOL staked.

Then the reality kicked in. The minute we announced the launch we saw 20,000 SOL staked and passed 50,000 SOL staked in less than an hour.

In 2.5 days, the cap of 100,000 SOL was reached and we didn’t allow any new stake orders.

Fast forward, in 2 weeks live, we celebrated these milestones:

Oh, and we almost forgot…

Partnerships and mSOL integrations

So we delivered the appetizer (liquid SOL staking) and were about to get ready with the main course — $MNDE, our governance token, launch.

Our users, unlocking their SOL staked liquidity by receiving mSOL, asked for immediate mSOL usage in DeFi. And so the beauty of a decentralized market set all the wheels in motion. While Marinade went with the flow.

Ready?

Sonar, a dashboard to track Yield Farming and Liquidity Pool performance, integrated mSOL and our pool.Sonar, a dashboard to track Yield Farming and Liquidity Pool performance on Solana.

Saber, the leading cross-chain stablecoin exchange on Solana, launched mSOL/SOL pool boosted by 60,000 SBR/day incentives.

 “Staking is the lifeblood of Proof-of-Stake blockchains like Solana. Democratizing access to staking is vital to ensuring the proper security, consensus, and decentralization of Solana itself. It has been a pleasure working with Marinade Finance to create a mSOL/SOL pool on Saber, making staking on Solana liquid and accessible to all.”  Dylan Macalinao, Co-Founder of Saber Labs    Saber, the leading cross-chain stablecoin exchange on Solana, launched mSOL/SOL pool.

Alert: skip this line if afraid of big numbers, mSOL/SOL pool on Saber has now $50M+ TVL.

Orca, the DEX for people, not programs, welcomed Marinade to the Orca pod and introduced mSOL/USDC pool.

Orca, the DEX for people, not programs, launched mSOL/USDC pool.

Switchboard.xyz, the community-curated oracle network on Solana, launched mSOL/SOL price feed.Switchboard, the community-curated oracle, launched mSOL/SOL price feed.

While this doesn’t sound like a big deal, it is and opens up a lot of possibilities to all the upcoming mSOL integrations in the Solana ecosystem. You heard right, we’re not done yet.

Besides these Marinade partnerships announcements, the market went and pulled off quite a few interesting use cases for mSOL as well — some honorable mentions are Raydium, Solfarm.io, LIQ Protocol, Parrot and Investin.

MNDE — Marinade governance token

As you might already know, Marinade has quite a background story to tell.

Early 2021, Marinade was born merging multiple teams working on liquid staking for Solana. We agreed we’re “stronger together” and we still share the same vision now talking to projects that might be better off working together on Marinade.

That’s why we allocated a part of Marinade for these “joint-ventures”, grants and onboarding new teams. Actually, this part is even bigger than the founding team allocation and that’s for a good reason — we believe there are many more people out there smarter than us. So we left a significant amount of free chairs around the table.

Next, we’ve not raised any money. There was no private or public sale, we don’t have any investors on board.

We also don’t have any validator node running to stay completely objective, you can check our delegation strategy together with the open-source delegation formula delegating now to nearly 150 validators to support decentralization efforts.

Being totally free and independent puts Marinade in the best position to achieve the ultimate goal of introducing MNDE token:

 Total democratization of liquid staking on Solana governed by a fully decentralized autonomous organization.

We did everything we can to make sure that even you, our dear follower, will have direct ownership in Marinade DAO and the power to steer Marinade’s next steps by voicing your opinion.

How to get MNDE, if there’s no sale, you ask?

The only way to earn MNDE is by contribution

We’re almost done with designing the initial distribution program. To drop a hint, we think of these contribution areas:

Stay tuned for the next updates regarding specifics on the Marinade DAO launch, we’re so honored to have such a vibrant community with us and can’t wait to give back!

Please, join us on Discord, share your story, or any feedback you might have. We do our best to listen carefully to all you have to say.

See you soon, marinated.

PS: Oh, one last thing, the stake limits. We promise the wait to lift the caps is over soon. It’s not that we don’t want you in, but we’re extra cautious and taking security very seriously. Internally, each cap increase is tied to higher confidence in the overall system security.