Introduction

Marinade.Finance was built to bring to life a vision. A non-custodial liquid staking solution on Solana, decentralizing the network.

Creation of Marinade

Marinade was born out of the merger of two projects trying to accomplish a similar goal: offer a liquid staking solution on Solana that participates to the decentralization of the network and its security.

The teams joined forces to work more efficiently towards making this idea a reality. Marinade formed around a set of values and a common objective and started building.

Goals

Help decentralization

One of the main propositions of blockchain networks is being censorship-resistant. That means no nation, corporation, or any other third party has the power to control who can transact or store their value on the network.

In the Solana network there are nearly 1,900 validators where the top 32 validators currently have enough staking power to be able to halt the network. When Marinade started building, this power was owned by the top 11 validators — we found this to be a problem from a security perspective.

Marinade tackles this by delegating the stake to smaller but reliable validators, spreading this power to more validators (see our Delegation strategy). This should significantly increase the number of validators with enough concentrated stake to halt the network.

Spread adoption

To onboard the next 1 billion people to crypto, we believe that the user experience must dramatically evolve and adapt to the needs of more users.

While early adopters don’t care about writing down seeds and pin codes for multiple wallets, storing it around their house, or burying it in the ground, we can’t imagine a world where this is still a standard after 5, 10, or 20 years.

That’s why we emphasize having our solution well-designed, seamless, and a pleasure to use — so that a friend can tell a friend that staking is as easy as clicking a button.

Create opportunities

With Marinade, you can start staking or depositing existing stake accounts with one click and get back your tokenized stake in the form of mSOL. It just takes another click to put mSOL in action in DeFi — add it as liquidity to an AMM, deposit to a lending protocol, and borrow stablecoin against it.. all while receiving staking rewards simultaneously.

By allowing people to use DeFi while staking and helping the network, we believe we are creating opportunities for many people.

For reference, more than 390,000,000 SOL tokens are locked in staking at this point. If we were to unlock and make liquid 10 % of these staked assets, we’re looking at $6B TVL to be put into the Solana DeFi world.