Kitchen Stories: January 2024 Marinade Report

Published in

Marinade.finance

6 min readFeb 7, 2024

Marinade is continuing to operate in profit, netting over $125,000.
Marinade revealed its two MNDE Earn bonuses for Validators and locked MNDE holders.
The rollout for Protected Staking Rewards will begin on February 15.

2024 is off to a good start at Marinade with the completion of Marinade Earn Season 1 and the launch of Season 2, which is currently ongoing and has two new bonuses for stakers. Activity on chain continues to grow throughout Solana thanks in part to Jupiter launching their token and other NFT and DeFi teams continuing to add incentives programs that Marinade stakers can benefit from.

Here’s the latest monthly update from the kitchen:

January Treasury Report

Marinade earned 2,143 mSOL in protocol fees for January (-17.5% MoM) for $239,047 (-1.6% MoM). After team expenses this translated to an operational profit of $125,582 (-14.6% MoM). Marinade’s TVL dropped 5% MoM to 10.5M SOL as Earn Season 1 ended on January 1st. But Marinade Native stake continues to grow, now past 4.1M SOL.

Marinade’s core team also earmarked 466,000 MNDE to be paid as a result of the overpayment bug from the Marinade Earn Season 1 that was identified and fixed (see Changelog). This MNDE will be covered from the core contributors’ portion of the 16M SOL Milestone Budget of 46M MNDE.

🛡️Protected Staking Rewards

One of Marinade’s key goals in 2024 is to delegate stake to as many validators as possible while maintaining high performance of the delegation set. This enables the Solana network to be as decentralized and robust as possible while still providing stakers with competitive staking rewards. Protected Staking Rewards lets stakers with Marinade spread their stake in one click without suffering any performance loss. Validators supply a SOL bond to Marinade and if there is any loss of performance, 95% of the difference will be repaid from the bond.

Marinade is planning to launch the first phase on February 15th. At this time, Marinade will begin delegating its SOL based on those validators who have set up their bond (it does not need to be funded yet). Over 70 validators have already set up their bond and there has already been some constructive feedback in the #Validators channel in Discord about how to supply the bond, and the latest update is that validators can have their bond set up permissionlessly.

Validators, please visit this rollout document showing how to onboard your node to PSR and be eligible, or visit the #validators channel in Discord to ask any questions or provide feedback.

Marinade Earn Season 2 and bonuses

Marinade DAO passed Earn Season 2 in January. It is similar to Season 1 but has a few changes.

The base rate for rewards is 1 MNDE per 2 SOL staked over the full three-month period. However, two bonuses have been added this time around.

Governor Bonuses: MNDE holders will be able to use their locked tokens to direct stake to the Marinade algorithm. By doing so they will be able to earn additional Earn incentives based on the 2 SOL = 1 MNDE ratio for the three months. Stay tuned for a dApp update introducing the MNDE voting for algorithmic stake and details on how to do it.

Validator Bonuses: Validators will earn MNDE based on their algorithmic stake score. This is retroactive for the full period. So 30k SOL scored by Marinade’s algorithm over the full period would net 15k MNDE to claim. Validators should set up their bond for PSR by Feb. 15 to stay eligible for Marinade stake and earn the second half of MNDE rewards.

Updating the Delegation Strategy

It’s been about a year since Marinade last updated its delegation strategy. With the launch of Protected Staking Rewards, the strategy is being revisited with the aim of both staking to more validators as well as revisiting its decentralization calculations. Chef LJ has posted in the forum the details of the changes. Here are some key points for consideration:

Eligibility criteria relied e.g. on averages of credits earned. But a lot of detail was lost when averaging. The eligibility criteria for algo stake and stake directing have been unified.
Concentration Score: The formula used for the concentration score will be updated and include the Country, City and ASO of the node.
Node stake: Previously node’s stake did not affect stake received from Marinade. The more stake the node has, the less score it will receive — up to a point where the node is no longer eligible to receive Marinade’s stake
Amount of validators: The delegation strategy will grow the number of validators from 100 to a formula based on TVL growth of Marinade.
Stake directing: MNDE/mSOL holders will be allowed to vote for algorithmic stake, effectively decreasing stake direction to specific validators. (This is incentivized in Marinade Season #2, so holders who do not run validators can also benefit from voting).

You can also use this testing playground created by Marinade to change the delegation parameters to see how it impacts stake.

Partnerships and listings

The month saw several new token listings as well as integrations of Marinade throughout the ecosystem.

Marinade’s Twitter has also been on a tear so far in 2024, adding millions of impressions and 50,000 followers!

Solana Scribes Hackathon underway

Marinade is participating in the Solana Scribes hackathon, the first hackathon on Solana for writers. It’s a longform research piece intended for crypto users early on their decentralized journey that compares what staking is like on Solana vs. a handful of other leading PoS networks. If you’re interested in submitting an article to be considered, do so from the Scribes Superteam Earn link.

Team Retreat

January was a good month for Marinade, especially because it let the core contributors, based around the globe, gather together in real life. The team met in Tenerife last month to game-plan key priorities on the build and growth side for 2024, while also being sure to get out and touch grass (and volcanic soil). The team left aligned on priorities heading into 2024: to further grow Marinade Native through new distribution channels and to launch and optimize Marinade Native and the delegation strategy to support a goal of 1,000+ profitable validators on Solana.

The team is already lining up more events for 2024, including Solana Crossroads, Solana Hacker Houses, Digital Asset Summit, and of course, the annual Breakpoint Conference in Singapore. If you plan on attending an event be sure to let the team know so they can say hello.