FAQ
You'll find the answers to most of your questions here! If something is not yet answered, reach out to us on our Discord.
What is Marinade?
Marinade.Finance is a staking protocol built on Solana. You can stake your SOL tokens with Marinade using an automated staking strategy expertly designed by the Marinade core team with influence from MNDE and mSOL holders. Users of Marinade can stake natively or liquid stake to the same pool of 100+ high-performing Solana validators. When native staking with Marinade, there is no smart contract interaction, while when liquid staking you receive an equivalent value of "marinated SOL" tokens (mSOL) that you can use in decentralized finance (DeFi). Since July 2023, you can also use Marinade Native to benefit from the automated delegation strategy with your natively staked SOL, without having to use any smart contract.
Is Marinade custodial?
No, Marinade is a non-custodial protocol. When staking to Marinade and receiving mSOL, you trade the custody of your SOL to receive custody over your received mSOL. With Marinade Native, you retain custody over your SOL at all times.
Marinade is also permissionless, meaning that our bot or our smart contracts can be interacted with by anyone, even in the absence of the team.
What is liquid staking?
Liquid staking is an alternative to traditional staking (or native staking). It allows users to benefit from a protocol's staking rewards while receiving a receipt token (mSOL) for their staked SOL that can be used in DeFi, making their staked assets liquid. Liquid staking also allows an instant unstake of your staked assets.
What is Marinade Native?
Marinade Native is a product released in July 2023 that allows users to benefit from Marinade's delegation strategy and have their stake automatically monitored and rebalanced, all while avoiding smart contract risk. The Marinade Native product also doesn't include any deposit or performance fee.
In exchange, the user does not receive mSOL and cannot use DeFi to look for additional yield.
How long does it take to stake and unstake?
With Marinade, you can stake SOL and/or unstake SOL immediately. There is no waiting time with our liquid staking solution. However, immediate unstake will involve fees (0.1% to 9%).
You are also free to use the delayed unstake to get your SOL back without any fee. However, you will have to wait 1-2 epochs to get back your SOL and the accumulated rewards.
The time displayed on your claim ticket (when using the delayed unstake option) is displayed in your local timezone.
Are staking rewards staked automatically?
Staking rewards are compounded automatically into the staked SOL.
Do I get MEV rewards by staking with Marinade?
Yes, you do. Marinade stakes to validator nodes running the MEV-optimized Jito validator client. Marinade collects and restakes these MEV rewards on the user's behalf. For mSOL holders, MEV is added to the price each epoch once rewards are claimed and added to the stake pool. For Marinade Native users, the MEV rewards are added to the user's stake.
What fees does Marinade charge?
For mSOL
The fee structure of Marinade is as described below:
Deposit fee | 0% |
Delayed unstake (1-2 epochs wait time) | 0% |
Instant unstake | 0.1% - 9% |
Commission | 0% on rewards |
Deposit fee
Marinade does not charge any fee to deposit your SOL.
Delayed unstake
Marinade does not charge any fee for unstaking provided a user waits 1-2 epochs by using the delayed unstake feature.
Unstake now!
On Marinade, your SOL is not locked and you are free to withdraw it instantly at any time by paying a small fee.
The immediate unstake fee varies between 0.1% and 9% and depends on the total liquidity available in the Marinade pool and the amount to unstake. Marinade’s liquidity target is set at 106,000 SOL. As long as this target is maintained after unstaking, the fee will be at 0.1%.
If the liquidity in the Marinade pool goes below the given threshold, the "Unstake now!" fee is calculated as:
unstake_fee = max_fee - (max_fee - min_fee) * amount_after / target
where:
max_fee = 9%
min_fee = 0.1%
amount_after = liquidity remaining after unstaking
target = 106,000 SOL
The unstake now fee can also be viewed in the Marinade dashboard when you enter the amount of mSOL you want to unstake.
Commission
Marinade currently has no management fees. Like the previous parameters, the management fee can be changed by the Marinade DAO.
For Marinade Native
Marinade native has:
No deposit fee
No management fee
No exit fee
When using Marinade Native, Marinade even covers the small transaction fees needed to rebalance your stake every epoch for you, making it cheaper than managing your stake yourself.
Has Marinade been audited?
Back in July, while still on devnet, Marinade asked the Solana Foundation for recommendations of auditors who know the ins and outs of protocols running on Solana. They introduced us to the Neodyme team (previously called ALLES! One), who reviewed most of the major protocols and even came up with a summary article: Solana Smart Contracts: Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them. We passed their code review with no critical issues found, and after confirming this with another set of white-hat hackers we decided it was a green light for us to launch on mainnet.
Their audit is available here: https://marinade.finance/docs/Neodyme.pdf
During our first week on mainnet, we started another audit with Ackee Blockchain and passed yet again with no critical issues by the end of August.
Their code review is available here: https://marinade.finance/docs/AckeeBlockchain.pdf
We also submitted our protocol to an audit by Kudelski Security which was published in November 2021.
Their audit is available here: https://marinade.finance/docs/KudelskiSecurity.pdf
Where are my SOL tokens?
When you deposit your tokens, Marinade automatically spreads their delegation among the top-performing validators that actively participate to Solana decentralization (See Delegation strategy). You will receive 'marinated SOL' (mSOL) tokens back in your wallet. mSOL can be unstaked to receive your SOL tokens back, plus rewards. mSOL increases in value every epoch relative to SOL.
If you use Marinade Native, your SOL tokens are in your wallet, in stake accounts, accumulating rewards.
Where can I see the validators Marinade delegates to?
You can find the full list of our current validators on our website or find Marinade's on-chain account here.
How long does it take for a stake account to be redelegated?
Marinade allows you to directly deposit your stake account and receive mSOL in exchange. This means that if you are already staking with a single validator, you can easily jump on board.
But what happens if you are delegating to one of the top validators, excluded from our delegation strategy? Marinade will accept it and redelegate it shortly after (if your stake account is eligible).
Stake accounts are redelegated at the end of epochs and it can take 1 to 2 epochs to redelegate those stake accounts to validators chosen by our delegation strategy.
How can I get mSOL?
There are different ways of obtaining mSOL:
Stake SOL to Marinade's staking pool and get mSOL. This is the simplest way and has no fees.
Trade for mSOL on secondary markets (centralized or decentralized exchanges like Coinbase, Raydium, Saber, etc.). Please keep in mind that in this case, you might be paying trading fees.
Where can I use mSOL?
mSOL can be used in many DeFi protocols, all without losing your staking rewards.
For example, you can:
Add mSOL to a liquidity pool on a decentralized exchange
Lend your mSOL or use it as collateral on borrowing/lending protocols
Supply mSOL to yield farming protocols
Trade with your mSOL on CEXs and DEXs
Etc.
We are always on the lookout for new protocols where mSOL could be integrated.
How is mSOL's APY calculated?
There are multiple ways to calculate the APY of a liquid staked token and they all have to rely on the projection of previous rewards over the next year. Nonetheless, Marinade tried its best to calculate and display the APY in the most honest and accurate way possible.
Marinade calculates its displayed APY using a 30-day SMA of the 14-day APY.
This means that in order to calculate the APY, Marinade uses the smart contract price of mSOL and compares it to the price mSOL had 14 days before. It does so every day and displays a final APY based on the average of those measurements over 30 days, projected over a year. You can see this data in our stats page.
Can I deposit my Stake Account directly?
Yes, you can deposit any stake account directly to Marinade. If you can't deposit your stake account, it can be for the following reasons:
Your stake account is not activated yet. This takes up to two epochs and you will have to try at a later time.
Your stake account contains less than 1 SOL. We have a limit to avoid bots and overload.
I am a validator. Can I receive stake from Marinade?
Yes!
Marinade is staking SOL to more than 100 validators. These validators are not whitelisted and do not have to do anything specific to be selected by Marinade's algorithm.
You can refer to our Delegation strategy to see how our algorithm selects validators. You can also take a look at our Delegation formula. You can also look at Directed Stake or MNDE.
Any public sale or IDO?
Marinade is bootstrapped and self-funded with help from ecosystem grants provided by Solana and Serum. We're not taking in any private investors or VC funds and are not doing any private or public sales. We plan to build our DAO around Marinade users and protocols.
Does Marinade have a governance token?
The Marinade token (MNDE) was released on September 30th, 2021 and is only accessible through liquidity mining or on secondary markets. Its max supply is 1 billion and you can find more information about it in on the MNDE page.
How can I use my MNDE?
MNDE can be used to participate in Marinade governance by locking your MNDE on Realms.
Once your MNDE is locked, you can vote on proposals and direct SOL stake to validators using the Marinade dApp. The MNDE can be withdrawn by committing to a 30-day unlock period to get back the underlying MNDE.
Does Marinade vouch for the security of protocols using mSOL?
No. mSOL is a permissionless token that can be integrated anywhere and by anyone. If a project offers the possibility to use mSOL, this does not mean that the project is safe or audited by the Marinade team at all.
We encourage you to always do your due diligence on your investment projects. If you have any doubts or questions, we will gladly discuss them with you on our Discord.
Can I use Marinade with a hardware wallet?
Any hardware wallet supporting Solana and SPL tokens will also support mSOL. You can send your mSOL to the Solana address of your hardware wallet and manage your funds from it.
If you are using Ledger, you will need to connect your Ledger to a browser-extension wallet to see and manage all your SPL tokens and NFTs or use DeFi protocols, as Ledger Live doesn't currently permit this. Connecting your Ledger to a browser extension (e.g. Solflare or Phantom) will not compromise your Ledger private key. You can follow the tutorials on the official Ledger website to connect your hardware wallet to a browser extension wallet.
Make sure to turn on "Blind signing" in the Solana application of your Ledger to interact with DeFi.
Can I split my Directed Stake?
No, it is only possible to direct stake to one validator, with both your MNDE and your mSOL. We recommend using multiple wallets if you want to split your directed stake.
How to check my Marinade Native stake accounts?
Solana explorers sometimes have trouble displaying stake accounts handled by Marinade Native. If you would want to check that your stake accounts exist on-chain and still are under your custody, you can directly run the Solana CLI on your machine and use the command:
Replace pubkey by your pubkey and you will get a list of all the stake accounts that belong to your wallet, including the ones created by Marinade Native.
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