Marinade vs Figment

Figment and Marinade both offer staking solutions on Solana, allowing users to earn rewards by depositing their SOL tokens. Although they share some similarities, each one differs in key aspects, such as their target market and product offerings.

Target Market

One key difference between Figment and Marinade is the scope of their respective target markets. While Figment centers their operations around appealing to institutional clients, Marinade aims to capture both institutional and retail users.

Asset Coverage

Unlike Marinade, Figment offers staking solutions for a wide variety of networks beyond Solana such as Ethereum, Celestia, Polkadot, Polygon, and more. This expands their target market to cover holders of many different assets.

Marinade, however, focuses specifically on the Solana ecosystem. This allows them to bring pinpointed expertise to maximize the benefits that their platform can offer.

User Onboarding

Additionally, Figment requires KYC procedures for all users, which is beneficial when it comes to meeting international regulation standards. On the other hand, Marinade’s product suite is open to anyone with a Solana wallet. By being native to web3, Marinade enjoys transparent and community-oriented features such as: 

• Easy access for global users with no signup process
• Decentralized and transparent governance, enacted by stakers of their native MNDE token
• Easily integrating with other prominent Solana ecosystem projects

Marinade’s commitment to participate in DeFi as a web3-native player also allows them to appeal to institutional users and DeFi native users alike. 

Staking Offerings

Marinade and Figment both offer native as well as liquid staking to their users. However, there are some important differences which keep each organization aligned with their target markets.

Native Staking

Both platforms offer native staking, which enables users to deposit SOL directly to Solana network validators, bypassing intermediary smart contracts. 

Eliminating smart contract risk appeals to institutional clients focused on minimizing risk. This is relevant to both Marinade and Figment, as they target the institutional market, which includes entities such as asset managers, exchanges, and custodians. 

However, Marinade innovatively expands its offering via unique reward-maximizing features for its native staking such as the Stake Auction Marketplace (SAM) and Protected Staking Rewards (PSR). 

The SAM is Marinade’s solution to maximizing rewards for native stakers. Typically with native staking, stakers only receive Solana network block rewards, while validators can also receive additional income via MEV tips and transaction fees. SAM enables stakers to receive some of these additional rewards by creating a marketplace for validators to bid for staked SOL. These bids go directly to stakers, which acts as a proxy to transfer a portion of validators’ additional rewards to Marinade native stakers. 

PSR protects against downtime risk by requiring validators to post a SOL bond. If a validator experiences downtime, the bond is proportionally paid to stakers to replace any block rewards they missed out on. So, PSR serves as a backstop that minimizes loss potential in the case of validator downtime.

Liquid Staking

Marinade’s liquid staking service enables users to deposit SOL and receive the mSOL LST in return. mSOL can then be used to perform additional functions, such as LP, lend/borrow, and farm with leverage in other prominent Solana DeFi platforms such as Kamino, Meteora, Raydium, and Solend. 

While Marinade handles the distribution and rebalancing of all SOL tokens in their liquid staking product, Figment takes a less direct approach. Specifically, Figment is a governing member and validator node operator within part of a larger organization called Liquid Collective, which aims to onboard institutions into their liquid staking products. Liquid Collective currently only offers this service to ETH holders, who receive the lsETH token in return for their ETH deposits. 

Conclusion

While Marinade and Figment share the common goal of onboarding institutional clients onto their respective liquid and native staking products, they also have fundamental differences. Marinade remains focused on the Solana ecosystem as one of its dominant staking service providers, while Figment targets institutional holders of many different proof-of-stake assets. Additionally, Marinade targets a wider user base in general by appealing to DeFi native and institutional clients alike, while Figment is strictly focused on institutions and enforces stricter policies such as KYC authentication.

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