👨‍🍳The MNDE token

Marinade’s MNDE token lets holders participate in the protocol's governance. This includes control of the DAO's fees, treasury, and which validators will receive the pool's SOL stake.

MNDE Details

Total supply: 1,000,000,000 MNDE

Circulating supply: See stats

Issuance date: 7 October 2021

Fully issued date: None (distribution based on DAO votes)

Mint address: MNDEFzGvMt87ueuHvVU9VcTqsAP5b3fTGPsHuuPA5ey

Minting: Disabled

Marinade was founded through Solana ecosystem grants at the Solana Hackathon in 2021 and launched its liquid staking protocol and mSOL liquid staking token on mainnet that August. The MNDE governance token was minted on November 7, 2021, as a fair-launch token with no ICO (Initial Coin Offering). Marinade launched on-chain DAO governance in April 2022. Since then, all decisions related to the treasury have been voted on chain.

In July 2023, The DAO migrated its governance platform to Realms. This enables direct control of the treasury and protocol decisions by MNDE holders. There is also a Marinade Council that has the power to control liquidity mining and operational multisigs.

MNDE Utility

The Marinade protocol generates revenue in the following ways:

Instant unstaking fees generated from its own SOL liquidity pool
Yield generated from active positions in Solana DeFi
Marinade is also piloting an MEV bandwidth marketplace, mTransaction.

Directed Stake

MNDE votes determine 20% of the Marinade Stake Pool (a governable parameter) via Directed Stake. As of November 28, 2023, MNDE directs over 1.8M SOL stake. SOL staked via Marinade’s liquid (mSOL) or Native stake pools are both eligible to be directed via DAO voting.

Stakers who utilize Marinade Native cannot vote for a specific validator, but their stake is factored into the overall amount of SOL delegated to validators.

MNDE Validator Calculator: Solana Validator Cogent Crypto created a MNDE Validator Calculator that lets validators calculate the ROI of MNDE votes based on MNDE and SOL market prices, their commission, server costs, and more.

How to participate in DAO governance with MNDE

To participate in DAO governance, holders must lock their MNDE on Marinade’s Realms governance platform. Locked MNDE is subject to a 30-day unlocking period which begins once the unlock is initiated. MNDE holders cannot vote during this period. Anyone with locked MNDE can send proposals on chain and execute them when passed. | View MNDE stats on Realms Governance

MNDE Earn Season Bonus

In Earn Season 2, Marinade introduced a Governors Bonus. Locked MNDE can be used to direct stake to the Marinade delegation strategy and receive additional MNDE rewards to claim at the end of the period. Learn more.

MNDE Incentives

Founded as a public good for Solana whose core mission is to contribute to a decentralized and performant Solana blockchain, Marinade’s main goal is to distribute MNDE to similar-minded ecosystem builders and enable them to control the parameters of protocol and treasury through governance.

Today the protocol has the highest TVL of any protocol on the Solana blockchain with over 10.5M SOL staked via Marinade’s liquid and native staking protocol.

While liquidity mining was prevalent in the early days of the token to grow distribution and liquidity, the DAO has since transitioned to a model where MNDE is distributed primarily via contributions to the protocol benefitting the TVL growth of the protocol. Projects can receive MNDE via the Open Doors Program, which provides a 4 MNDE per 1 SOL staked over 12 months to grow protocol TVL and decentralization of Solana through its delegation strategy to 100+ validators.

Marinade’s core contributors do not receive time-based token unlocks, only TVL milestone unlocks. Read more about Marinade’s MNDE and incentives.

MNDE token allocations

7.5% of MNDE (75M) is allocated to initial contributors. This distribution was completed in January 2024.

The remainder of the MNDE treasury is under the control of the DAO, which can submit proposals and vote to determine how and when to distribute the tokens.

Current MNDE allocations passed and earmarked

A budget of up to 6M MNDE budget for Marketing expenses between September 2022 and September 2023.
A budget of up to 160M MNDE for the Open Door program, capped by Marinade's TVL growth.
A 46M milestone budget was distributed to the team and advisors for TVL objectives. When operating expenses are greater than protocol revenue, MNDE is taken out of this budget to support contributor compensation.

View real-time MNDE info on Marinade’s stats page

MNDE Liquidity Mining

MNDE was originally airdropped to mSOL holders and then offered as incentives in liquidity mining to boost token distribution. Liquidity mining of MNDE is now under the Marinade Council's control, which can determine the DeFi protocols and pools to support, if any. At this time, there is no liquidity mining available for the MNDE token. Visit the Marinade forum to view proposals for MNDE incentives.