Marinade as a Solana public good

Imagine resources or services so universal that they are accessible to everyone without limiting anyone else’s access. Now, open your eyes. If you imagined public parks, roads, and clean air, you already know what a ‘public good’ is. Public goods are ‘non-excludable’ and ‘non-rivalrous. The DeFi examples include open-source applications, decentralized protocols, and community-led infrastructure projects.

Now look on-chain. Marinade is Solana’s first non-custodial liquid staking solution. It strengthens Solana’s network security, boosts decentralization, and enhances the staking user journey with an easy-to-use solution. Marinade plays a key role in the ecosystem as a public good for Solana.

Consider the Solana ecosystem without Marinade. Stakers who navigate the complexity of staking alone risk losing their assets to security exploits. They may also lose control of their assets altogether by using centralized alternatives with disproportionate power and influence over the network. Additionally, they could also lose an opportunity to achieve 100% uptime and claim the highest staking yield.

This is where Marinade comes into play, designed to solve these challenges effectively. As a result, Marinade exemplifies the principles of an on-chain public good:

When Marinade talks about making a difference within the Solana ecosystem, what does that mean for those involved? Let’s explore its tangible benefits for both stakers and validators.

Public Good Functions for Stakers

Marinade, as a public good for stakers, denotes the true nature of the reward it provides to its stakers, i.e. security and yield optimization.

Native Staking Without Smart Contract Exposure: Marinade’s non-custodial native staking feature allows users to maintain complete control of their SOL tokens. That way, your SOL never leaves your wallet, making it safer than other staking methods where you have to expose your funds to a smart contract.

Optimized Yield: Marinade delegates SOL to the highest-performing validators using a delegation strategy that ensures stakers get the best possible returns. This means that your staked SOL is always performing best without you having to manage them.

Yield Consistency with PSR: Protected Staking Rewards (PSR) is a recently launched feature that makes staking on Marinade lucrative. It ensures that even if a Validator underperforms, stakers receive 100% of their reward.

Liquid Staking for DeFi activities: Marinade allows you to stake SOL and receive mSOL in return. This can then be used in various DeFi activities like lending, borrowing, and trading across 20+ integrations in the Solana ecosystem, enabling you to earn staking rewards while still having liquidity access.

By safeguarding the interests of stakers, Marinade promotes a healthy environment for validators, leading us to the next aspect.

Public Good Functions for Validators

Marinade uses a merit-based delegation strategy to support small and independent validators to help them attract more stake, making the network decentralized and even healthy. Here’s how it works:

Merit-based delegation: Marinade uses the performance-based metric to distribute 80% of the TVL to the best performers, and 20% of TVL is delegated based on the Marinade community votes through the Marinade DAO governance forum. This strategy encourages good behavior and strengthens the right set of validators in the ecosystem.

Publicly Accessible Pipeline: This process runs in a publicly accessible pipeline in the GitHub repository.

Public stats: Marinade recently published a network page that covers statistics like network performance, Nakamoto coefficient, validator performance scores, and economics. Leveraging this, users gain transparency into how the network is performing, and the visibility helps maintain trust and incentivizes validators to perform at their best.

Public Good Functions for the Wider Ecosystem

Marinade also extends its benefit beyond stakers and validators, positively impacting the broader Solana ecosystem.

Permissionless Integration of mSOL: Marinade’s permissionless integration of mSOL extends its utility, allowing any protocol to integrate mSOL without prior approval. This expands the reach of Solana’s DeFi network and ensures that mSOL can be used across various applications, amplifying its adoption and utility.

Open-source SDKs: Marinade’s open-source SDKs make it simple for developers to integrate Marinade staking into their projects. This permissionless approach means anyone can build on Marinade’s infrastructure, embracing a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement.

By providing these tools, Marinade assures its benefits are accessible to all builders, further decentralizing and democratizing access to efficient staking solutions.

Access the Marinade Github Repository here.

Conclusion

Marinade initially started as a bootstrapped hackathon project but has now grown to become a top protocol in the Solana ecosystem, demonstrating its importance as a public good.

By making the staking experience more accessible and safer than ever and promoting a more decentralized network, Marinade has significantly contributed to Solana. The community-driven efforts and diverse features like delegation strategy, PSR, and open-source SDKs benefit everyone involved, from stalkers and validators to developers.

As Marinade continues growing and innovating, it remains committed to making staking simple and rewarding for everyone. This helps Solana achieve greater success and sustainability, ensuring a more robust network for everyone.

Stay tuned for more updates and features from Marinade, and join the conversation on X to learn how we are designing for the future of staking and decentralization on Solana.