Marinade Finance: A New Chapter in Liquidity Staking in the Solana Ecosystem

Understanding Marinade: An Protocol Revolutionizing Staking Experience

In the DeFi space on the Solana blockchain, Marinade Finance (MNDE) stands out with its innovative liquid staking mechanism. This protocol offers participants a new way to engage in the development of the Solana ecosystem while maintaining asset liquidity — addressing a core pain point faced by traditional staking.

Marinade’s core idea is that users can stake SOL tokens into high-performance validator node pools and receive mSOL liquid staking tokens as proof of stake. This design fundamentally changes the staking paradigm: your assets are no longer “frozen,” but can be used freely across the entire DeFi ecosystem.

How Marinade Works and User Options

The protocol offers two staking options to cater to different investor preferences:

Liquid Staking: By binding SOL to shared validator pools via smart contracts, users immediately receive mSOL tokens. The value of these tokens increases over time — within each cycle, the system automatically adds Solana’s inflation rewards to the staking pool, and the exchange rate of mSOL to SOL improves accordingly. More flexibly, mSOL can be directly exchanged for SOL on secondary markets or used as collateral in DeFi.

Native Staking: This bypasses the liquid staking contract, allowing users to directly earn compounded rewards. While this method does not provide the liquidity benefits of mSOL, it involves lower interaction costs. When withdrawing staked assets, a 1-2 cycle unlock period is required; however, liquid staking users can pay a nominal fee to accelerate withdrawals.

Notably, users can directly convert their existing SOL staking rights into mSOL without first unbonding. Marinade’s decentralized app makes this conversion instant, allowing users to immediately start earning rewards.

MNDE Token: A Dual Role in Governance and Incentives

Marinade’s native governance token MNDE has a total supply of 1 billion tokens. This token grants holders voting rights in the Marinade DAO (mDAO), covering key decisions such as management fee adjustments, financial oversight, and SOL distribution within validator pools.

Token issuance history began on November 7, 2021. It was launched via a fair launch model with no initial coin offering (ICO). In April 2022, Marinade officially implemented on-chain DAO governance, marking the transition of power directly to MNDE holders.

Participation in governance requires users to lock tokens on the Realms platform. Locked tokens have a 30-day unlock cooldown period, during which voting is disabled. However, locked MNDE holders can submit proposals on-chain, which are executed upon approval.

MNDE’s current market performance and supply structure

According to the latest market data, MNDE’s real-time price is $0.05, with a circulating market cap of approximately $25.42M, and a circulating supply of 547 million tokens.

Token distribution follows this logic: initial contributors receive 7.5% (75 million MNDE), with the distribution period ending in January 2024. The remaining tokens are allocated to a DAO-controlled treasury, with issuance timing and methods decided by community voting.

Currently, about 130 million MNDE are locked within the DAO governance structure, employing a gradual unlock mechanism based on total locked value (TVL). This design ensures token release aligns with protocol growth, strengthening the link between decentralized decision-making and ecosystem locked value.

Background and Technical Vision of Marinade

Lucio Tato co-founded Marinade Finance in 2021. Prior to that, the project received an $80,000 grant from the Solana Hackathon. Tato is an Argentine developer focused on the technical development of proof-of-stake chains like Solana and NEAR. He is also a co-founder of Meta Pool, a multi-chain liquid staking solution, further demonstrating his deep expertise in staking innovation.

Future Outlook and Ecosystem Positioning

Marinade Finance offers a staking solution that balances innovation with usability for the DeFi ecosystem. Through user-centric design, transparent governance, and comprehensive functionality, it provides a solid pathway for users eager to participate in Solana’s ecosystem development.

As more users recognize the complexities of engaging in DeFi on Solana, Marinade’s value proposition becomes increasingly prominent — enabling earning staking rewards without sacrificing asset liquidity, a balance still rare in the current DeFi landscape.