Marinade Kitchen Stories: April 2023

Published in

Marinade.finance

4 min readMay 10, 2023

In April, many initiatives began bearing fruit for Marinade.

At the beginning of the month, Marinade officially introduced Gaius as their new Master Chef! Gaius joins in a business development role to help onboard more protocols and projects to mSOL liquid staking. Combined with Open Doors and existing collaborations across the ecosystem we’re already seeing more and more integrations happening, and there has been some nice discussion lately on Twitter around the value of liquid staking tokens propping up DeFi liquidity across Solana. Word is definitely spreading!

Marinade recently held its latest Open Kitchen, hosted by Gaius, where we discussed some latest governance updates and the upcoming Directed Stake product. You can listen in here as long as the recording remains online.

Marinade featured in Saga Phone launch, Dialect Sticker Packs

April was a huge month for Solana as not only did Helium migrate to Solana and Render voted to be the next DePIN project to move to Solana, but the long-awaited Saga mobile phone officially shipped to the first users as well. Marinade was included in the first round of DApps for the Saga and the only liquid staking DApp in the initial release.

The Dialect team also continues to create new user-friendly updates on their mobile messaging platform. Marinade’s NFT sticker pack was officially minted. Check them out!

April Treasury Report

April was strong for the mDAO treasury Month-over-month. Revenue of 2,176 mSOL was up 26.89% MoM, driven in particular by unstaking fees from the SOL liquidity pool. Total monthly revenue in USDC terms was $49,190 (up 26% MoM). Team expenses were $107,397 (+18% MoM), paid out in roughly 50% in MNDE. MNDE liquidity mining incentives totaled $11,695 for the month.

Overall, the mDAO USDC treasury balance ($215,298) is up 7.58% MoM and mSOL (4,318) up 2.74%. You can always view Marinade’s wallet details publicly at these addresses: DeFi | Treasury

Whale unstake event from November completed: Speaking of numbers, you may have noticed a TVL drop of 23% for Marinade towards the end of April. This was because a whale account that initiated a delayed unstake of their 1.5 million mSOL around the time of the FTX-Alameda collapse in November and left it unclaimed for nearly six months until finally claiming it. While this SOL was technically tracked as TVL because it was still under Marinade’s contract, this SOL had not been generating any staking rewards for validators or Marinade this whole time.

For those curious, leaving the SOL in the unstake pool for 5 months caused this whale to lose out on 40–50,000 SOL.

The positives however are that Marinade’s contract was able to handle this huge transaction seamlessly with full on-chain transparency, and now that it’s been claimed will hopefully be put to use in the ecosystem. Considering there is no idea when FTX depositors will recover any of their funds as legal fees mount and chew into the balance, this is another argument in favor of on-chain DeFi vs. centralized black boxes.

Governance update

In April two proposals were passed relating to the next phase of mDAO governance:

Ratify the constitution and code of conduct: You can view both in their respective forum posts. These will be the documents utilized by the mDAO moving forward with regard to how the mDAO governs and how the community will be managed. View Constitution | View Code of Conduct
Multisig transfer to Realms: Marinade is operated by three multisigs and two will of them — the treasury wallet and operational multisig, will be moved to Realms for greater transparency. This move also introduces the opportunity as governance development progresses to more directly connect the mDAO treasury to votes.

The Grant committee also completed payments to two projects: Vyper protocol is receiving 100,000 MNDE to bootstrap liquidity and incentives for their MNDE-mSOL leverage trading pair. When installed, MNDE holders will be able to go long-short mSOL with their MNDE. The Solana Snapshots grant was also completed with Sonder. This new feature will allow for improved mSOL tracking for the directed stake product across multiple use cases and wallets.

mTransaction Open Beta

mTransaction, which is Marinade’s MEV product that provides a bandwidth marketplace for transaction searchers, has surpassed 45 million transactions in closed beta, and has officially moved to Open Beta. This means any validators with more than 200,000 SOL stake and between Europe and US-East time zones can run mTransaction and collaborate with Marinade on its future utility. Validators should contact the Master Chefs if they are interested in joining the Open Beta.

Take Marinade’s new Validator survey: Validators, we want to hear from you as we roll out mTransaction, the directed stake and continue to enhance the Validator Dashboard. Please fill out this brief survey to help guide our next steps!

Drift introduces mSOL trading integration

The beginning of May has brought another mSOL integration to the ecosystem! Drift, a Solana DEX that features leveraged trading, has added support for mSOL trading, as well as lend-borrow! This means you don’t have to deposit SOL or USDC to trade, but deposit mSOL to go long and short or trade spot. Stay tuned for more on this partnership (including a trading competition where you can win MNDE!)

That’s it for April. May should be an exciting month as the Directed Stake product officially ships and we continue to see more growth and rebirth of Solana DeFi with new mSOL integrations on the way. Stay tuned!