Marinade.Finance is a non-custodial liquid staking protocol built on Solana. You can stake your SOL tokens with Marinade using automated staking strategies and receive "marinated SOL" tokens (mSOL) that you can use in decentralized finance (DeFi).
The price of mSOL goes up relative to SOL each epoch with rewards being accrued into the underlying staked SOL.
You can withdraw your SOL at any time by unstaking and waiting for the unlock period (1-2 epochs) or immediately with a small fee (see our FAQ). You can also directly exchange between mSOL and SOL on secondary markets at the current rate.
What are the benefits of staking SOL?
Blockchains use consensus protocols in order to validate transactions in a secure and decentralized way. We won't dig deep into the technicalities, but you will find a good explanation of staking in the Solana documentation.
When you stake (lock) your SOL tokens to a validator, you are helping to secure the network and participating in the decentralization of Solana. In return for locking your SOL, you receive rewards in SOL.
For the decentralization and the security of the Solana blockchain, we need as much SOL as possible staked to efficient validators. With the growing number of use cases for SOL in DeFi, a fair amount of SOL is still not staked and used daily in DeFi.
Marinade offers you the possibility to stake your SOL in exchange for mSOL that you can use in DeFi while still enjoying the staking rewards. The SOL that you are staking with Marinade is spread among more than 450 validators, excluding the so-called "security group" (top 25 validators). Validators are chosen by our transparent, permissionless formula and automatically rebalanced.
Marinade DAO
First of all, Marinade DAO (mDAO) is an open kitchen. Radical transparency is one of our main values; anyone can come and see what we are cooking. You are also free to contribute to the project (and get rewarded!), just join our Discord and engage with us.
The other way of joining the mDAO is by owning MNDE tokens. These are governance tokens that will represent your voice on the future of Marinade.
Marinade has already onboarded community members to actively contribute to the project. By joining our mDAO, you can participate in the discussions, voice your opinion on any matter, and vote on important decisions, but you can also get involved in the development of our kitchen.
Values
When doing what we're doing, we come back to the following set of values:
- Radical transparency. At Marinade, we believe in the blockchain movement. Technological transparency with data and learnings accessible to everyone with an extremely quick feedback loop is rapidly speeding up the evolution of humankind. That's why we are gradually opening up everything from financials, system dashboards, and ongoing projects to the code base. Open-source rules the world. This also applies to our social layer - we welcome every open, honest individual to join our kitchen.
- Be a no-ego doer. Marinade was born out of a merger of different teams aligned with the same vision - to fully democratize liquid staking on Solana. We're thinking about what's best for Marinade's vision, putting egos aside while always trying to find the best solution no matter who brought up the idea. We also prefer to go and get stuff done. Deliver. Perfect is the enemy of good, quite often.
- Work smarter, not harder. You know the story about the woodcutter being so busy cutting the trees that he does not have time to sharpen his saw? Well, we put focus on sharpening the saw, improving the way we do things at Marinade step by step. We aim to work the system, not to be a fire killer.
- Collaboration over competition. We believe in positive-sum games in a collaborative environment. We've reserved enough space in Marinade to meet and welcome more bright minds that will join us to cook collectively in our open kitchen. We prefer this over wasting resources on keeping things secret and trying to outsmart others.
