Marinade Kitchen Stories: May, 2023

Published in

Marinade.finance

5 min readJun 9, 2023

The month of May was major at Marinade, featuring both big launches, integrations with partners, and the subsequent spike in TVL. A first look into what’s next was also shared with a first look at Marinade V2.

The month brought an increase of over 500,000 SOL to the Marinade stake pool. To date, the stake pool now sits at over 5.6M SOL and growing. There’s been a lot of chatter about Liquid Staking Tokens across all chains, and more and more DeFi users are wising up to the potential composability that LSTs offer.

Is this a peek into Solana Liquid Staking summer? Hopefully so!

Here’s a roundup of some other highlights during the month.

Directed Stake launches

The big news of the month for Marinade and all Solana Validators was the launch of Directed Stake. This is a feature that validators have desired for a while, and Marinade has officially shipped it! We’re already seeing validators mobilize their community and even build on top of it to bring their stakers even more rewards.

How it works: When you stake with Marinade, you can choose to send your mSOL to the existing algorithm or vote to send it to the validator of your choice (one validator per wallet).

Thanks to Solana Snapshots, Marinade can continue tracking this directed stake when it’s used in top DeFi protocols including Solend, Raydium, Orca, Tulip, Saber and Port. Marinade has already received requests to add more protocols as well as Marinade’s mSOL staking for MNDE mining option, and the devs have it on the list to get them added.

Validators, keep in mind that this product replaces the Liquid Self-Stake product from 2022. It’s now easier than ever to self-stake your SOL and make it liquid, and it can be tracked across even more protocols. And this year you can also get MNDE via Marinade’s Open Doors program.

And special thanks to Avaulto for building this dashboard where you can see which validators have received the most Directed Stake.

Solana DeFi integrations highlighted by Drift and Solend

Solana DeFi continues to bounce back and build better in 2023 after being battle-tested in a big way in 2022. Numerous protocols integrated Marinade in May, highlighted by some of the O.G. protocols of DeFi.

Drift integrated mSOL for trading on its DEX, and to celebrate Marinade held an AMA and supported a trading competition valued over $2,000 for those who deposited 20 or more mSOL. Congrats to the four winners of this competition.

Also, our good friends at Solend collaborated with Marinade to create a new widget for their collateral platform. Now, users who go to Solend who have a native staking account will be promoted to deposit the account to Marinade for mSOL and then have the option to deposit the mSOL on Solend to earn lending fees plus liquidity mining rewards.

This is a feature Marinade has had on its DeFi page since last year with the launch of Zaps, and we’re working with Solend to make a Marinade terminal available to all protocols on Solana. Check out the forum post from Solend’s Nope requesting a grant for this work, and you can also listen in to our recent AMA featuring Gaius and Solend on Twitter Spaces:

Treasury Report

In May, Marinade grew its mSOL TVL 11.63% and generated 1,848 mSOL total in fees between staking management fees and from the liquidity pool. Revenue was down 15% MoM but team expenses were also down 23.23%. Liquidity mining for the month was 427,807 MNDE ($13,690). The Treasury balance is now $504,984 (-11%). Team expenses were $50,319 USDC and (1.003M MNDE). This MNDE is taken from the team’s milestone budget which has 41.3M MNDE remaining. View Treasury wallet | The DAO wallet can now be viewed on Realms here.

More Validator Dashboard updates

More and more stakers and validators alike are discovering Marinade’s Validator Dashboard released at the end of 2022.

Marinade continues building on the Validator Dashboard, and with the v2 version of Marinade, which will enable native staking via Marinade, there will be more and more opportunities for validators to get in front of Marinade’s audience to receive stake. Validators are invited to fill out this survey and provide some details for their validator page.

Trails Protocol

Liquid Staking has been getting a lot of interest across chains and on Solana, a new platform that has driven a lot of interest to Solana DeFi, NFTs and in particular Marinade. Trails Protocol, built by some of the team at Flipside, has designed in partnership with Marinade a “learn-to-earn” platform featuring interactive, educational content for leading protocols like Marinade, Tensor, and Jupiter. So far, over 3,000 wallets have interacted with the Marinade learning trail. That’s 3,000 more wallets who know about the value of liquid staking! In fact, early on Marinade’s trail has been the most popular of them all! If you haven’t taken the trail, you can do so at Trails.fm.

Building Marinade V2

As originally shared in this May announcement post, the Devs are now currently building out the vision for an all-encompassing Marinade V2. The premise behind V2 is simple: Marinade should be the home for all things Solana staking, not just liquid staking, and the mDAO and MNDE should be integrally linked with the protocol. Stakers should also be able to utilize Marinade’s delegation strategy, even if they don’t want the smart contract risk that accompanies liquid staking. This shift will make Mariande’s addressable market ALL Solana stakers and not just those who want to liquid stake.

It’s going to be an exciting Summer around Solana. Stay tuned!