1/ Marinade is @bookingcom for Solana staking.
Validators compete in an open auction for your stake (6.14% 14-day APY), and the latest round just settled. Here's who won, and how the mechanism works. ๐งต
5/ The result: higher yield for stakers, and a market that rewards the validators delivering it.
The auction re-runs every epoch, a living mechanism, not a one-time leaderboard.
Marinade pioneered liquid staking on Solana. I'm proud of that.
I've also been reflecting on where we went wrong. Plainly, because I'd rather own it than pretend. Three mistakes, one root: we drifted from who we are.
1) We weren't opinionated enough.
Marinade was built to fight Solana's centralization, spreading stake across 100+ validators from day one.
Then the problem moved: spam, then liveness and resilience, then performance and market structure as alternatives started taking Solana's share.
We stayed loyal to the old mission and missed where the network actually was.
And where we did act, with the Stake Auction Marketplace, we deferred to a free market on a young network with twisted incentives. Bad actors exploited it.
We were slow to see it and slower to step in.
We told ourselves the protocol would fix the incentives from within. It will. But shipping that tooling wide open, in the meantime, was not responsible enough.
Being market-driven is not the same as being responsible.
2) We drifted from our core. We started as a bootstrapped hackathon project, fully remote, finding our people on Discord. Builders who just got Solana.
Then FTX hit.
To survive we cut costs and moved on-site to stay fast. We brought in excellent web2 builders, but we narrowed our pool away from crypto-native talent, and the native spark that catches problems early got thinner.
Then we reached for the bigger market. SOC 2 Type II, qualified custodians like BitGo and Anchorage, real and hard won, but DeFi natives trying to become the suits we are not.
We forgot the users who built Marinade in the first place. We're product people, not salesmen.
3) We treated MNDE as an afterthought.
Not as a real part of Marinade. Thin tokenholder comms. Patchy governance transparency. Value accrual we changed back and forth with the market until we stopped being predictable, and liquidity dried up.
Predictability is a promise. We didn't keep ours.
The quiet airtime, the sentiment, the volume, the price. Those are symptoms. The cause is one thing: we drifted from being close to our users and to the health of Solana.
None of this is an excuse. It's a scorecard, and naming it is how we fix it.
Back to who we are. Product people, building for the users and the network we believe in. Predictable, responsible, present.
That's the work.
New on Marinade Native: stake solana:So11111111111111111111111111111111111111112, earn your rewards in $SPCX. ๐
Your Solana staking yield now accrues as tokenized SpaceX equity, 1:1 backed by real shares, redeemable, dropped to you every epoch.
Stake Solana. Own a piece of the rocket.
Built with @sunrise & @Backpack.
๐งโ๐ณ Stake X, Earn Y /w @MarinadeFinance
My goal is for every platform offering yield to offer what @MarinadeFinance has been cooking.
Not only can you stake $SOL and earn $BTC, you can now earn Gold, $NVDA or the solana:XsoCS1TfEyfFhfvj8EtZ528L3CaKBDBRqRapnBbDF2W.
Are you not entertained?
1/ Unstaking on Solana takes up to 48 hours. Time is money, and SOL moves any hour.
Marinade Instant Unstake now works for ANY validator position. 100% of the staking market can reach deep liquidity the moment it's needed.
100,000 SOL (~$6.8M) out instantly. 0.11% fee. โก
Any team already building on @yield_xyz can offer Solana staking through Marinade (6.15% APY) with zero extra SDK work. Same enter, exit, and manage calls.
Two ways in:
1) Marinade Native: custody-first, no smart contract between users and their stake
2) mSOL: liquid staking
Marinade is now available through https://t.co/EkGa0CMC50.
Both mSOL and Marinade Native are accessible today, offering best-in-class SOL staking yields at ~7% APY.
Existing integrators can add @MarinadeFinance to their Earn suite today ๐งต
Third-party data from @kamino risk dashboard past 10 epochs (May 25โJun 13): staked SOL with Marinade posted the highest epoch APY of the major Solana LSTs, about 6.1% on average, and stayed above the LST median every single epoch.
Same SOL. More yield.