Marinade Finance is a liquid staking (no $SOL lock-ups) solution running on Solana, that launched on the 2nd of August 2021. It initially launched with a self-imposed staking limit of 100,000 SOL and hit its max after 2.5 days! After an awesome launch last year, their TVL grew during the “2021 Solana Bull Run” to $1.88B TVL. It is now stable at $0.7B TVL with it looking like it’s crossing back over $1B soon and the Marinade team are releasing some exciting new features!
So How Does Marinade Liquid Staking Work?
If you are holding on to any Solana ($SOL) then hopefully you are staking it and earning a return. This can be done within the popular wallets like Phantom and Solflare. However, there is one big problem with this method of staking. It is the fact that your SOL tokens become locked during the staking process and if you want to get them back you will have to wait 2 or 3 days for the next Epoch to be finished (You can see when the next Epoch finishes at Solana Beach).
The people at Marinade Finance, solved this problem by introducing liquid staking to the Solana Ecosystem! This lets you stake your SOL, earn Solana staking rewards, receive mSOL which is valued at close to SOL price that can be used to explore additional yields across the Solana DeFi ecosystem.
So What’s the Benefit of mSOL over Staking Normal SOL?
The three main advantages of Staking your Solana with Marinade are the following:
- You can unstake your Solana immediately, without waiting 2 to 3 days for the Epoch to finish!
- You can play around with your capital in the form of mSOL, to get additional yield!
- You help improved Decentralisation of the Solana Network!
The proof is in the numbers. The amount of SOL staked has been very stable over the past few months. The amount of SOL staked with Marinade has been around 7.2 million SOL TVL over the past few months, which is a great sign!
How to Stake Your Solana with Phantom & Solflare
It is super easy to staking staking your SOL with Marinade:
- Visit Marinade.Finance and “Start Staking SOL”
- Connect your Phantom or Solflare wallet
- Choose how much SOL you want to stake
- Hit “Stake SOL”
- Approve the TX in your wallet
Marinade is Great for Solana’s Decentralisation
Whilst you stake your SOL with Marinade, you help the Solana Network with decentralisation! Marinade has an open-source algorithm that automatically stakes with 400+ validator nodes based on a fair formula that factors in performance, commission, and decentralisation.
… Because of its open and permissionless delegation strategy, Marinade can now support, bootstrap and incentivize the growth of up to 6,000 validators in the Solana network, a 300% increase on the roughly 1,500 validators active at the start of 2022. Such an increase in validators has pushed the Nakamoto coefficient, or the number of top validators controlling a third of all SOL staked, from 19 to 40, meaning it now takes at least 40 validators to be able to collectively halt the network. This is huge progress for decentralisation! Marinade makes Solana secure, robust, and censorship-resistant.
Marinade Blog
You can learn more about the open source algorithm of how Solana Validators are chosen for staking at the official Marinade documentation!
Marinade is Super Secure
For those worried about security, you can rest assured that Marinade Finance has been audited by 3 separate security firms – Neodyme, Ackee Blockchain & Kudelski Security! Read more at their Official FAQ.
Marinade are Introducing a DAO and MNDE Governance
By locking in your MNDE you receive voting power, ownership over the protocol fees and an exclusive NFT that represents your locked position!
Check out the video to learn more:
So what do the Marinade NFT’s look like?
Marinade Governance NFT’s have finally launched!
Update: 5th of April and the Marinade NFT’s are now live!
