Marinade Kitchen Stories — 24/12/2021

Hello Marinators,

We hope that your 2021 year has been as incredible for you as it has been for Marinade. The crypto world is wild and this year has been eventful for blockchain technology and for the Solana ecosystem. Last year at this exact date, SOL was priced at $1.34 and Marinade did not even exist!

With the year coming to an end, let’s have a brief overview of what you, the Marinade community, accomplished since launch in August:

• More than 7M SOL staked, securing the network, for a total TVL of $1.45B;
• delegating to more than 400 validators;
• and making Marinade the 3rd biggest TVL on Solana.
• More than 20 000 accounts staking with Marinade.
• 167 000 SOL distributed as staking rewards to all users since inception.
• mSOL is integrated and available in all most used protocols on Solana.
• Marinade’s governance token, MNDE, was released and is being distributed.
• Marinade became a multi-audited protocol, governed by a multisig before DAO tooling is introduced.
• The Marinade brigade grew significantly. From a small team in the hackathon this summer, Marinade now counts more than 35 active contributors in all fields.

Phew. What a road already, and how much more to do!

Now, it’s time to open the kitchen doors and see what our contributors have been working on in those last two weeks. A lot of promising things are coming up in 2022 for Marinade and now is the best time to get involved! If you aren’t already in, our Discord is the best place to hang out.

So, what has been cooking and smelling so good those past weeks?

• Our new UI is almost ready to roll out, with an aim to have it ready and online by the end of the year! If you haven’t found it already, an Easter egg has been hidden on our webpage. It should link you to something interesting 👀
• Our referral program has launched and allows our partners to earn a share when their users stake to Marinade through their app. We will start contacting partners to integrate it and soon, you will be able to stake SOL to Marinade from many places in the Solana ecosystem!
• A whole communication workgroup has been created and is currently starting on producing content for you Marinators! You can expect more Marinade content for the year to come!
• Several new partnerships and integrations are taking place. mSOL has been integrated into Friktion and Chest.finance and we’re seeing more and more projects adding mSOL right from the start. The first NFT projects minting in mSOL are also on the horizon.
• Our DAO forum has been created and will welcome all the long-term discussions about the future of Marinade, if you haven’t created your account or read the ongoing discussions, please feel free to jump in. An important discussion is currently happening on the future utility of MNDE and we would love your insights!
• We have welcomed Orca, Port, and Jupiter for AMAs (all available on our Youtube channel), and organized a “GM for coffee” daily lottery for Marinators. If you want to connect with Marinade’s community, don’t miss out on our Discord!
• Some ground is being covered on DAO tooling and the building continues! We hope to be able to integrate DAO tools on mainnet as soon as possible, to keep leading the march towards decentralization!
• Finally, the Marinade NFT project is still in the oven and is currently being designed and prepared. If you are excited about it, stay tuned for more information.

As you can see, the building continues and Marinade delivers! It will be a pleasure and a chance to share the year to come with our incredible and diverse community of Marinators.

If you like the Marinade Kitchen Stories, feel free to share them or to let us know!

As a last note, I personally wanted to remind everyone that Marinade belongs to the ones who want to come to build and govern it! Your opinions and your contributions will always be valued, so if you like what you see in our kitchen, consider getting involved yourself.

What is Marinade.Finance?

Marinade.Finance is the first non-custodial liquid staking protocol built on Solana. You can stake your SOL tokens with Marinade and receive “marinated SOL” tokens (mSOL) that you can use in decentralized finance (DeFi).

The price of mSOL goes up relative to SOL each epoch, with rewards being accrued into the underlying staked SOL. Marinade 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).

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