Marinade is a liquid staking protocol that is built on top of the Solana Blockchain. It essentially allows users to stake their Solana (SOL) tokens with Marinade through the usage of automatic staking strategies, where in turn, for doing so, they receive staked SOL tokens (mSOL) which they can use in Decentralized Finance (DeFi).
Additionally, they can be used to swipe back to the original SOL tokens to unstake. That said, on October 8, the Marinade MNDE token went live on Solana for the very first time.
What Is the Role of The MNDE Token?
Marinade helps users stake SOL tokens without needing to lock their liquidity by turning SOL into mSOL, which is a tokenized version of the staked SOL.
This way, users secure the network by staking SOL, and they can also use the mSOL tokens as a unit within the Solana DeFi ecosystem. Additionally, Marinade is a community-driven project. The only way to get MNDE tokens is to contribute.
The goal of MNDE is to achieve a total level of democratization of liquid staking on Solana. This democratization is governed by a fully decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Alongside this, the goal is to establish mSOL as the ultimate unit of account within the ecosystem.
Additionally, the MNDE token:
- Incentivizes liquidity
- Forms the DAO
- Capitalizes the treasury
On October 8, there was over 3 million SOL, which is 1% of the total circulating supply, staked with Marinade. At the time of writing, on October 12, this went up to 5.5 million SOL, which showcases the level of interest within the Marinade liquid staking protocol. This leads to $820 million in total value locked.
Additionally, the total stake limit was raised to 11 million SOL staked on October 11. This could potentially be the last raise before the limit is removed completely.
There is a maximum supply of 1,000,000,000 MNDE tokens.
- 35% are for the DAO.
- 35% are for the treasury, which will be fed with mSOL protocol fees, including 2% of staking reward fees and ¼ of liquid unstake fees. The rest go to the liquidity providers.
- 30% goes to the team. However, the team tokens are subject to a 2-year vesting period with a six months lockup period.
There was no token sale, no private investors, and no VC funding for Marinade.
How Does Marinade Make the Network Secure and Decentralized?
Marinade makes the network secure and decentralized due to the fact that it uses a transparent and permissionless algorithmic delegation strategy.
In other words, the deposited SOL gets delegated to validators. The goal here is to balance the best value for the users in terms of both APY and SOL market cap. Marinade uses open-source code to compute a score that is awarded to validators based on their performance, commission, and decentralization objective.
Based on the points which are received, the validators are automatically awarded a percentage of the total stake, mSOL tracks hundreds of validators that have the best performance and automatically spreads and rebalances the stake across, and improves network security and decentralization as a result.