Marinade Kitchen Stories — May 2022
Hello everyone,
An eventful month of May has passed and it’s time for the Chefs to summarize the latest news and developments in the kitchen as well as some highlights across the Marinade and Solana ecosystem.
Validators Gauges and changes to the delegation strategy
On May 8th, one of the most important and exciting governance votes for Marinade was passed and led to the integration of Validators Gauges.
After extensive discussions on Marinade Forum to hash the details of the proposal out and discuss some of its parameters, the proposal to integrate gauges to allow MNDE holders to direct stake towards specific validators was sent to Tribeca and was widely accepted by MNDE holders.
Validator Gauges will now control 10% of the total Marinade stake, currently representing 630k SOL. The control of those SOL will be shared among the locked MNDE in gauges. If a user controls 1% of the locked MNDE in gauges, they control 1% of the stake controlled by gauges.
These gauges do not allow to delegate stake to validators in the Superminority, or to go above the current Marinade cap of 1.5% of the total stake. This way, Marinade continues decentralizing and spreading the stake out of the Superminority, and continues its quest to raise Solana’s Nakamoto Coefficient, which has increased to 25!
After a few weeks, a bit less than 3M locked MNDE has been used in gauges, controlling approximately 630,000 SOL. These gauges create a new and efficient way for validators to obtain stickier stake, and opens the door to a lot of future development possibilities. If you have never used gauges on Tribeca before, Marinade has covered the basics for you:
In order for the gauges to work in the best possible way, the Chefs also had to cook an update to the delegation strategy. The implementation of Partial Unstake now allows a better redistribution of the stake every epoch which will help validators reaching the appropriate stake according to their performance faster. If you want to learn more about this update, it is documented in the Marinade Changelog and the Delegation Strategy page has been updated to reflect the changes.
In order to apply those changes, the Chefs had to use the Marinade multisig that has already been introduced in this previous article. The code was also peer-reviewed by multiple developers, from Marinade and other projects, and the Soteria software was ran on the new code. As always, Marinade places a strong focus on security.
Compensation plan for the Unstake incident
After the incident during Epoch 284 in March that led to the unstaking of a large part of the SOL held by Marinade, a Forum conversation took place to determine what would be the best way to answer this situation. A few ideas emerged but the most supported one was to reduce Marinade fees to 0% for 3 months, or until 2646 SOL have been redirected to the staked SOL pool. This proposal made his way to Tribeca to be voted on by MNDE holders, where the vote passed with a large majority of holders approving it.
The Chefs discovered that this specific proposal was running into an issue when executing it, which requires some time to be fixed. Since the compensation plan has been delayed already, Chefs decided to act on the fee change before executing the proposal on-chain.
Chefs will soon communicate on when this change will be applied, both on Discord and Twitter. Stay tuned.
Marinade DAO Financial Overview — May 2022
As of June 1, Marinade holds $300k worth of assets (SOL, mSOL, USDC, MNDE, etc.) in its treasury, split in different liquidity pools, lending protocols or kept to deal with expenses. As explained previously, the Chefs also have access to the DAO treasury that can be used for strategic partnerships, operations or grants.
For the month of May, the expenses of Marinade were 134,585 USDC (or 2839 mSOL at current prices) and 272,982 MNDE (or 594 mSOL at current prices). The emission of tokens allocated to the team also accounted for 9,479,158 MNDE. Liquidity Mining program accounted for 4,022,860 MNDE over the month of May.
In the meantime, Marinade revenues accounted for 1,264 mSOL (or around $60k at current prices).
As for every protocol, the crash after the Terra event had an impact the activity on Marinade and SOL price, but the Chefs are confident that the financial outlook for Marinade is positive, especially with the planned Token Exchange Program. As the compensation for the unstake incident will lead to a reduction of profits for Marinade, the MNDE treasury might be used to compensate for some of the needed expenses in the next three months.
AMAs and Community Events
Despite the market conditions, Marinade community has stayed active as always!
First of all, GM for Coffee is back for the foreseeable future, from Monday to Friday! Greet your fellow marinators with a ‘gm’ every morning for a chance to get your coffee paid in USDC by Marinade!
A ‘Marinade Meme contest’ also took place during the last part of the month, with the theme “Taste of Decentralization: A Marinated recipe for securing Solana”. Marinator ‘K2SE’ won with the following meme:
You can also see the memes from our five finalists here on our Discord. If you feel that you’re a SoMEMElier, be sure to join Discord to catch the next one!
Marinade Discord hosted two AMAs in May. Kudelski Security, an audit firm that has worked on both Solana and Marinade’s security, joined us for their first AMA. It was a pleasure to welcome such respected auditors in the kitchen and get their insights on what’s happening and needed on Solana in regards to safety and security for the future.
Our friends at Orca also returned to the kitchen as the first ever repeat guest, to talk more about their Whirlpools featuring concentrated liquidity, and the future updates they have in mind. Orca has enjoyed rapid user growth in recent months. You can watch the entire AMA below:
The Chefs have also been busy visiting other communities and collaborating with other content teams to help tell Marinade’s story. Torab, Marinade’s Head of Partnerships, joined the SolanaCove podcast to talk about Liquid Staking!
If you’re more of a reader, Marinade has also appeared in a Blockworks article addressed to institutional (only paid subscribers). You can also learn more about validators in Marinade’s ‘Validators spotlight’ series, with the last article focusing on Jonny, aka SolanaCompass.
If you think Marinade should invite a specific project or join a community or podcast that you enjoy, reach out to Chefs and let them know your suggestions.
Marinade in Chinese
If your browser language is set to Chinese, you might have noticed that the Marinade website has been fully translated to Chinese. This follows the translation of Marinade documentation to Chinese that was put online a few months ago, with the goal to make the Marinade sauce accessible to all communities.
In the meantime, a Chef from the kitchen is also working on a translation of the documentation to Russian, as Russia hosts a lot of validators and Solana users. If you have any feedback on the new Chinese version, please share it with the Chefs know on the Discord.
Partnerships and mSOL integrations
First of all, Marinade closed a big partnership during the month of May, with our ape friends from DegenDAOO.
As TheSaintEclectic described it on his Twitter thread, this partnership is an example of DAOs joining their effort together to help reinforce the security of the Solana network.
DegenDAOO had already made steps towards this direction by building their own validator on the Solana network, and when they met Marinade and their decentralization and security objectives, the alignment became pretty evident.
By acquiring MNDE in exchange for marketing and educational content, DegenDAOO becomes an active member of the MarinadeDAO and will be able to use the gauges for their own validator. Because of this, they will also be able to integrate Marinade’s SDK and liquid staking solution directly on their website and app. With this, DegenDAOO will encourage its users and holders to discover the perks of liquid staking, while making their validator run efficiently with the control that they acquire over the gauges with MNDE.
MNDE will be distributed to the DegenDAOO over the year, after specific milestones of the partnership are reached, with the objective of building a long-lasting and relevant partnership between those two influential DAOs.
Also in the NFT world, the project Divine Dogs has transferred a part of their treasury to mSOL and has started working on educational content around liquid staking. We are happy to see DAOs and NFT projects getting more and more interested in liquid staking and getting behind the values of Marinade. Chefs are happy to see a growing interest from the NFT world, as they truly believe that in order for mSOL to become the unit of account of the Solana ecosystem, a lot of education and visibility will need to exist for all kinds of users.
mSOL has also made its appearance in the Exodus wallet, a multi-chain oriented wallet. Marinade is a “featured Web3 app” in their browser extension and Exodus is now supported as a wallet from the Marinade app.
New liquidity pools also appeared on Crema, and the mSOL Friktion volt is now incentivized with MNDE through the Liquidity Mining program.
Chefs activity in the Kitchen
During the month of May, our new Chef Ryfo joined the Kitchen to help with Community management, events and NFTs-related discussions. You might have already heard him on a few Twitter Spaces or discussed with him in our new #nft-corner channel. If you wanted to see more NFTs discussion on Marinade, they are now thriving!
On another note, TriSync, one of our beloved Chef from the Partnerships workgroup, wrapped up his contributions to Marinade during the month of May. TriSync was one of our earliest contributors and helped onboard many partners beginning last fall and into 2022. The Chefs thank him immensely for the work he did over the last months and wish him the best moving forward.
Finally, this monthly update can be concluded by mentioning the first ever Marinade retreat. The Chefs came together in Italy from all over the world in order to work together IRL. The activity and energy in this retreat are obvious and Chefs are all working hard on the next steps for Marinade, for liquid staking and for Solana.
This retreat is also an opportunity to meet some partners and other projects that will join and build with Marinade for a few days.
About Marinade
Marinade.Finance is the first non-custodial liquid staking protocol built on Solana. Stake your SOL tokens with Marinade and receive mSOL (“marinated SOL”) tokens in return that can be used in decentralized finance (DeFi). mSOL is the most widely integrated collateralized version of SOL. The price of mSOL goes up relative to SOL each epoch, with rewards being accrued into your stake account.
Marinade’s delegation strategy stakes to 400+ validators that are selected automatically by an open-source, fair formula based on performance, commission, and decentralization.
