Marinade is Solana’s top liquid staking protocol.

In this deep dive, we’ll discuss how Marinade gives you the easiest method for staking SOL without locking up your funds and while simultaneously securing the Solana blockchain.

First of all, what is Marinade Finance exactly?

Marinade Finance is a non-custodial staking protocol, this means that your tokens are in your possession and always accessible.

Users are able to stake their SOL tokens and receive marinated SOL (mSOL) in return.

mSOL liquid tokens act as a receipt for your staked tokens, but they allow you to trade freely while your SOL compounds automatically in Marinade’s staking protocol.

Withdrawing staked SOL is free after waiting roughly 2-4 Days, or users can incur a 0.3-3% fee for immediate withdrawal.

Below you can see how simple it is to stake your SOL and receive mSOL to begin earning around 5-6% APY on your SOL.

Once you’ve obtained mSOL it can be used throughout the Solana ecosystem for things such as:

• Adding to Liquidity Pools
• Lending or using as collateral on lending/borrowing protocols
• $MNDE Staking

Many protocols support mSol including: Orca, Raydium, Solend, Hubble, Kamino, Aldrin and more

For more ways to utilise mSol you can view the Marinade Cookbook which features many strategies and an outline of risks involved: https://marinade.finance/learn/cookbook/

So why do we actually stake our SOL?

When we stake our tokens, they’re spread among validators that maintain the Solana network. Validators are responsible for processing new incoming transactions on the network, as well as voting on and appending new blocks to the blockchain.

We still own the tokens, but by assigning them to a particular validator or validators, we increase their voting weight. As they’re trusted with more stake delegations, their “proof” to the network that their votes are trustworthy allows their votes to be weighted in proportion.

Marinade’s job as a permissionless stake pool is to collect as much SOL as they can and spread it amongst 400+ validators, this supports decentralization.

The more decentralized Solana is, the more robust and potentially valuable it becomes.

There’s currently 7.55m SOL staked with Marinade (≈$245m):

Marinade also has their own token (MNDE) which had a fair launch* in October 2021. (there are no VC insiders*)

Marinade want’s to be a true community project operated by key stakeholders in the ecosystem (Validators, protocols, NFT projects + anyone else)

Marinade has two main goals:

1. Decentralize Solana
2. Decentralize Marinade (Through MNDE Governance)

The total supply of MNDE is 1 billion and the allocation is as follows:

35% – DAO Distribution

Used as token holders see fit via proposals.

35% – DAO Treasury

This is dedicated to operations, grant programs and strategic partnerships.

30% – Team

For current & future contributors.

MNDE is intended to build a healthy foundation for Marinade to be ran on transparently. Hence why such a large portion is dedicated to the DAO & Treasury reserve.

The actual governance itself is decided by holding a Marinade NFT

Marinade’s Chef NFTs give you access to governance voting through the @TribecaDAO platform, a Solana-based protocol used for creating/managing some of the biggest DAOs that we see in our ecosystem today.

To find out more about Marinade’s governance system visit: docs.marinade.finance/governance.

The work that MarinadeFinance puts in to give Solana DeFi a good name is shown everyday by their popularity and success. We’ve found them to be a great example of how a DeFi protocol should be ran.

Long term the success and growth of Marinade will lead to further decentralization and stability of the Solana network so everybody wins!