Marinade launches first SOL native staking service with zero smart contract risk or fees

Marinade launches first SOL native staking service with zero smart contract risk or fees

TORTOLA, WEDNESDAY, JULY 19, 2023: Marinade Finance, Solana’s leading staking platform and biggest project by total value locked (TVL), is announcing the launch of its first-ever native staking service. Marinade Native will allow users to stake SOL directly with over 130 network validators in one click, non-custodially with no smart contract risk.

Until now, those wishing to stake SOL natively with multiple network validators required multiple transactions, and also constant performance monitoring. Liquid staking enables staking through pools to multiple validators, however, it carries smart contract risk through an on-chain program.

This has made staking unattractive to many institutional investors who could not tolerate either the smart contract risk of liquid staking or the high concentration risk of relying on the performance of one validator. Currently, over 97% of all staked SOL (370 million SOL) is staked natively with individual validators, translating to an $8.1 billion opportunity for Marinade Native.

Marinade Native combines the delegation strategy concept of liquid staking with the non-custodial benefits of native staking, as users will never lose custody of their staked SOL. The average yield for Marinade Native staking is currently 7% APY* with zero management fees.

Moreover, Marinade’s smart delegation strategy, which uses a novel scoring system to select the top 100 validators based not only on yield but performance and decentralization, ensures users’ SOL is spread across a tested pool of validators. This formula determines which validators receive 60% of Marinade’s stake, while MNDE and mSOL token voting account for 20% each.

Cerba, Core Contributor of Marinade Finance, says: “The launch of Marinade Native marks a key milestone in the Marinade 2.0 rollout, which we are excited to deliver. Marinade remains a firm advocate of liquid staking, which offers a host of other benefits to users as well as the Solana ecosystem as a whole. However, we recognize that many institutional investors are balancing important risk considerations with returns, and for the first time they can now benefit from a stake delegation strategy with no smart contract exposure.”

“Our current community of mSOL and MNDE holders will also benefit. Because 20% of the Marinade stake pool is determined by MNDE token voting, the expansion that Marinade Native facilitates will ensure the MNDE token is increasingly appealing to validators. As a bootstrapped, community-first project launched with zero VC funding in 2020, it is important that our community remains involved in all governance decisions and benefits as the protocol grows.”

Other benefits for the Marinade community include:

• Marinade will offer additional MNDE incentives for Marinade Native for 12 months starting in August. This will raise the Marinade Native staking APY higher than the APY of staking directly with any individual validator.

• These incentives also aim to attract large holders to move their stake from one validator into the Native product to earn both staking rewards and governance power, while also distributing their SOL stake across 100+ high-performing validators.

*Staking APYs change daily according to Solana epoch times and validator performance