Marinade: Overview

What is Marinade?

Marinade is one of Solana’s leading non-custodial staking protocols, offering both liquid staking (mSOL) and native staking to support decentralization, liquidity, and staking rewards optimization. It operates as a DAO-governed system with over 75,000 unique wallets and one of the largest active validator sets on the network. Uniquely, Marinade introduces the Stake Auction Marketplace (SAM), which is a validator bidding system that redistributes high-reward MEV tips and enhances validator competition. With nearly $2 billion in total value staked and a growing footprint across DeFi, Marinade is one of the most critical infrastructure layers on Solana.

Marinade Dashboard

The Marinade dashboard provides comprehensive, real-time analytics across staking, validator behavior, treasury finances, and token flows. Powered by Blockworks Research, the dashboard breaks down Marinade's protocol economics into intuitive tabs, making it useful for DAO contributors, MNDE holders, stakers, researchers, and institutional participants alike. It includes granular access to data like mSOL mint/burn trends, SAM validator bid markets, treasury assets, and staking yields, all of which are filterable by day, week, month, or year.

How can I use Marinade analytics?

Financials

The Financials tab offers a full protocol-level income statement and balance sheet. Key metrics include:

• Network Revenue (REV): Total revenue from settlement and validator bid fees
• Staking Revenue: Earnings from native and liquid SOL staking
• Treasury Holdings: Asset composition across mSOL, USDT, MNDE, and reserves
• Balance Sheet & Capital Flow: Changes in treasury staked capital, stablecoin reserves, and quarterly performance
• Expense Tracking: Validator subsidies, downtime protection, and slashing insurance

Onchain Activity

The Liquid and Native Staking tabs highlight user activity and behavior:

• Active Stake Tracking: Epoch-by-epoch view of SOL staked via liquid and native methods
• User Cohorts: Stake size distributions (10 SOL to 100k+) across time
• Yield Comparisons: Real-time APY for liquid vs native staking
• Address Growth: New and cumulative staker address tracking
• Stake Actions: Visualizations of deposits, withdrawals, and validator reassignments

What is Marinade’s Stake Auction Marketplace (SAM)?

SAM is Marinade’s competitive validator marketplace that allocates stake based on bid strength and performance. Validators compete to receive delegated SOL, and high-bidding validators redistribute a portion of rewards (including MEV tips) back to Marinade stakers.

Key elements include:

• Validator Bidding: Validators bid each epoch for stake delegation slots
• Redistribution of Rewards: $6.9M+ redistributed to stakers from high-tip earners
• MEV Mitigation: Validators must bid for delegation, reducing passive MEV extraction
• Staker Protection: Validators provide bonds to protect against downtime or low performance

How does Marinade split Liquid and Native Staking?

Marinade is one of the few protocols that allows users to choose between liquid staking (mSOL) and native delegation. The dashboard visualizes:
 

• mSOL Yield vs Native APY: Performance deltas and real-time trends
• Stake Composition: Share of total staked SOL across modes
• User Preferences: Native vs liquid usage over time, with behavioral cohort analysis
• Backing Ratios: Real-time solvency of mSOL, including reserves and stake coverage

This distinction gives users control over how they prioritize composability (DeFi access via mSOL) or validator choice (via native delegation).

How is Marinade data gathered?

All Marinade analytics are sourced through:

• Indexers like DefiLlama and custom Solana endpoints
• RPC nodes connected to Solana mainnet
• Proprietary models from Blockworks Research
• Cross-source validation, ensuring normalized and accurate insights

What is Network REV in Marinade analytics?

Network REV measures the real economic value flowing through the protocol. In Marinade’s case, this includes settlement rewards, or earnings from staked SOL across validators, and SAM validator fees, or payments from validators bidding for stake via auctions. Unlike chains with base and priority gas fees, Solana’s model emphasizes stake-based reward flows, so Network REV provides a clean view into protocol-level economic demand—particularly how much validators are willing to pay for delegation rights.

Why is on-chain activity important in Marinade analytics?

Marinade is fundamentally a staking interface and DeFi routing layer. Measuring on-chain activity helps track:

• Staker growth and churn
• Validator selection behavior
• Yield fluctuations and stake reallocations
• Protocol adoption by new wallets and sectors

On-chain data acts as a leading indicator of protocol health and user confidence in validator performance.

How can I track DEX activity on Marinade?

The dashboard tracks both mSOL and MNDE across:

• DEX Trade Volumes: Swap activity via Raydium, Lifinity, Whirlpool, and Meteora
• Net DEX Activity: Volume bought vs volume sold per token
• CEX vs DEX Holdings: mSOL and MNDE balances on exchanges like Kraken, Coinbase, and Gate.io
• Token Flow Trends: Inflows, outflows, and treasury movements across wallets and protocols

This is especially useful for LPs, traders, and governance token holders evaluating market behavior.

How can I track Marinade’s treasury and capital flows?

The Financials tab gives unmatched transparency into Marinade DAO’s internal balance sheet. You can monitor:

• Quarterly Gross Profit and Revenue
• Stake Rewards vs Treasury Expenses
• USDT and mSOL Capital Movements
• Treasury-backed MNDE Emissions

It’s one of the few dashboards where you can tie protocol usage to DAO solvency in near real-time.