Marinade Press Kit

Please find official Marinade information, imagery, infographics and contacts below for your use. For additional info or media inquiries, contact press@marinade.finance

About Marinade

Marinade is a Solana stake automation platform that monitors all validators and delegates SOL stake to a set of over 100 top-performing ones. Marinade's liquid staking token is mSOL, a collateralized and fully liquid version of SOL a user receives when they stake their SOL in the Marinade stake pool. Marinade is also the creator of Marinade Native, the first product on Solana that offers the performant and permissionless staking strategy of Marinade, but without the liquid staking smart contract.

Marinade DAO is governed by the MNDE token. Holders can vote on proposals, control the treasury, and vote for validators when they lock their tokens in Realms governance.

Supporting Decentralization

Marinade supports the decentralization of Solana by using a validator delegation algorithm that stakes SOL to 100 independent validators. This delegation strategy also bypasses the top validators in the maximum security group in order to further promote censorship resistance (often measured as the Nakamoto Coefficient). mSOL is the most integrated liquid staking token of SOL and was designed to be installed effortlessly by any size project. Projects across the Solana ecosystem can easily utilize mSOL for their own needs and also use the Marinade Referral program to drive additional value.

DAO governance through MNDE

Marinade is a DAO with a governance token, MNDE, which can be locked into the Realms governance platform to enable governance access to the token holder. This includes voting on proposals, oversight of the treasury, and voting for validators to receive Marinade stake. In order to unlock the tokens, a 30-day unlocking process must be initiated in Realms.

Directed Stake

Directed Stake using mSOL and MNDE accounts for 40% of Marinade's delegation strategy to validators (20% each). Wallets that stake SOL for mSOL and direct the stake to a validator using the Marinade dApp will also support the validator with additional MNDE votes if their wallet has it locked in governance. As of July, 2023, directed stake accounts for over 2.5M SOL stake. Learn more about how Directed Stake works.

How Marinade began

Marinade was founded in March, 2021 during the Solana x Serum Hackathon when a working prototype for a liquid staking solution of SOL tokens was successfully developed. Marinade is a bootstrapped project with no initial venture capital or an ICO investment thanks to grants from the Solana Foundation and Serum. Following three successful security audits, Marinade deployed its mainnet at Marinade.Finance in August 2021. By January 2022 it had achieved the number one position for TVL (Total Value Locked) on Solana with over $1 billion.

Marinade transitioned to a fully on-chain DAO in April, 2022 and is governed by the MNDE token via Realms SPL Governance on Solana.