The Future of Staking on Solana: Inside Marinade Labs' Journey from Hackathon Project to Institutional Infrastructure

The Solana staking landscape has undergone a remarkable transformation since the network's early days, evolving from a simple delegation mechanism into a sophisticated ecosystem of liquid staking tokens, institutional-grade infrastructure, and soon, staking-enabled ETFs. At the center of this evolution sits Marinade Labs, one of the original and most influential staking protocols on Solana. In a revealing conversation on Lightspeed, Marinade CEO Michael Repetný shared the untold story of the protocol's founding, explained why native staking is outpacing liquid staking, and offered a glimpse into the high-stakes competition to become the staking provider of choice for Solana ETF issuers.

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The Unconventional Origins of Marinade Labs

Marinade's founding story reads like a crypto thriller, complete with co-founder drama, unexpected alliances, and a bootstrapped ethos that defied the venture capital playbook dominating the industry. Michael Repetný's journey to building one of Solana's most important infrastructure protocols began in late 2020, when he was actively exploring the crypto space after running a web analytics company and doing conversion rate optimization consulting in the e-commerce world. His initial exploration led him through various blockchain ecosystems, including Polkadot and what was then called Near Summer, before a chance Discord conversation changed everything.

"I was looking for a gig in crypto," Repetný explained. "And I was trying to understand what crypto is about technologically, not only getting rich super quick, because that didn't work out well." Through participation in hackathons, he connected with a fellow Slovak developer who claimed to have a team ready to build on Solana. The reality, however, was far from what was advertised—there was no team, just a solo developer whose previous teammates had abandoned him after participating in a Denver hackathon with a similar liquid staking concept.

What followed was a whirlwind two-week hackathon sprint to build something that would fundamentally change Solana's staking landscape. Repetný and his partner assembled a team by reaching out to individual participants on Discord, building what would become the foundation of liquid staking on Solana. The concept itself wasn't novel—liquid staking existed on other chains—but bringing it to Solana was uncharted territory. "I knew the concept as a user coming from the other chains, where it felt great," Repetný recalled. "You could be both staking, get a staking yield, and at the same time participate in DeFi."

The Co-Founder Split and the $88,000 Grant

The hackathon success brought both opportunity and conflict. After winning a prize, tensions emerged between Repetný and his co-founder over the project's direction. Former team members who had previously abandoned the project suddenly reappeared, claiming ownership of the name and pushing to build on chains other than Solana. This was the breaking point that would define Marinade's future.

"That was the moment when I realized I wanted something else. He wanted something else," Repetný explained. The team held an informal vote and sided with Repetný's vision of building exclusively on Solana. The decisive moment came during a call with the Serum Foundation, which had agreed to provide an $88,000 grant to the project. With both co-founders on the call, Repetný acted quickly, providing his wallet address for the grant funds instead of his former partner's. This single transaction effectively determined the project's future leadership.

The $88,000 grant—modest by crypto standards—became Marinade's entire runway for the next six to seven months. "We paid nothing to ourselves initially," Repetný admitted. The founding team rejected all venture capital investment, choosing instead to build independently. This decision would prove prescient, allowing Marinade to maintain its independence even as major players like Lido, fresh from their Ethereum success, attempted acquisition overtures.

Merging Competitors and Building the Team

In another unexpected twist, Marinade's team expanded through what might be crypto's most civilized approach to competition—merging with a rival hackathon project called SmartPool. After the initial drama settled, Repetný methodically reached out to every hackathon participant via Discord, asking about their plans. Lucio from SmartPool responded, and discussions began about combining forces rather than competing.

The merger brought together two codebases and crucially added Marco Bröken to the team—the developer who would later leave Marinade to co-found Triton, one of Solana's most important RPC infrastructure providers. This connection to Triton underscores how Marinade's early days functioned as an unofficial incubator for Solana infrastructure talent. The network effects from those early collaborations continue to benefit the ecosystem today, with former Marinade contributors now building critical infrastructure across the Solana stack.

From Retail DeFi Protocol to Institutional Infrastructure

Marinade's initial product was straightforward: stake Solana through a web app, receive MSOL (Marinade's liquid staking token), and use that token throughout DeFi. The growth was impressive at first, with TVL rising from zero to six million SOL within months. Then growth stalled, prompting the team to investigate why liquid staking wasn't achieving broader adoption.

The answers they received fundamentally reshaped Marinade's strategy. Users cited smart contract risk as their primary concern—a valid worry given that liquid staking requires trusting additional code beyond Solana's base protocol. They also noted that Solana's native staking was already remarkably accessible, allowing anyone to delegate as little as one SOL to any of the network's thousand-plus validators with a simple click. The two-day unstaking cooldown period, while not instant, wasn't onerous enough to justify the smart contract risk for many users.

These insights led to Marinade Native, launched two years ago, which eliminated smart contract risk entirely. The product sits atop classic Solana staking, diversifying stake across multiple validators while maintaining a crucial separation of powers: the withdrawal authority stays with the user, while only the stake authority is appointed to Marinade's system. "At no point can [Marinade] touch the underlying Solana," Repetný emphasized.

The 90/10 Split: Why Native Staking Dominates

Perhaps the most striking revelation from the conversation was the current state of Solana staking distribution. Only 10% of staked Solana sits in liquid staking tokens, with the remaining 90% in native staking without any smart contract risk. This ratio has barely budged despite years of LST development and marketing—the number has only increased from around 6% a year or two ago to 10% today.

Repetný identified several factors keeping institutions away from liquid staking beyond smart contract risk. Compliance concerns around pooled assets create uncertainty about who else is in the pool and which validators receive delegation. Many institutions need to know their stake is going to validators in approved jurisdictions with verified compliance status. Tax implications also play a role, with some jurisdictions treating SOL-to-LST conversions as taxable events, while native staking delegation remains tax-neutral.

"Most MSOL and even today most LSTs are not even used in DeFi," Repetný observed. "If you look at on-chain, majority of LSDs are just truly held in wallets." This raises fundamental questions about the value proposition of liquid staking for users who aren't actively deploying their tokens in DeFi protocols—why accept smart contract risk for liquidity you don't actually use?

Marinade's current TVL of 10.5 million Solana splits evenly between liquid staking (MSOL) and native staking, but the team sees significantly more growth potential on the native side. "We feel like there is much more potential, much more opportunity on the native staking front just because of what the market tells us," Repetný stated plainly.

The Stake Auction Marketplace Revolution

In summer 2024, Marinade introduced the Stake Auction Marketplace, a mechanism designed to address a fundamental asymmetry in Solana staking economics. Validators capture priority fees—100% of which go to the block producer—but traditional stakers have no visibility into or participation in this value. At certain points, priority fees represented an additional 1-2% annualized yield that stakers were simply missing out on.

The Stake Auction Marketplace creates a competitive bidding system where validators deposit a bond (called the Protected Staking Rewards bond) that serves as insurance for performance delivery. Validators then bid for stake allocation, specifying how much they're willing to pay per 1,000 SOL delegated to them. Marinade's system allocates stake to maximize returns for stakers, taking a cut from the bid flow while passing the majority back to delegators.

"Validators hated it," Repetný admitted, "because for the first time ever, it was exposed pretty much how much of the priority fees were resulting in yield captured previously by validators." The auction system forced transparency into a market where large whales had previously negotiated off-chain deals for preferential commission rates unavailable to retail stakers. Marinade's marketplace democratized access to these better rates.

The Sandwich Attack Problem and Its Resolution

The permissionless nature of the Stake Auction Marketplace created an unintended consequence: malicious validators engaged in sandwich attacks—exploiting leaked transaction information to trade ahead of users—could participate alongside legitimate operators. These validators generated outsized profits that allowed them to outbid honest competitors, effectively using the marketplace to acquire more stake for their exploitative operations.

Marinade initially hoped the network would solve this problem independently. "We were thinking, okay, the network's got to sort it out," Repetný explained. The team was in contact with Triton and various applications attempting to build transaction blockers that would prevent leakage to malicious validators. But the cat-and-mouse game proved intractable—even the Solana Foundation's delegation program and other stake pools contained validators engaged in these practices.

With tooling from the Ghost team (creators of sandwich.me) and other researchers, Marinade eventually gained sufficient data to identify malicious actors "beyond doubt." Through double governance proposals, the community voted to blacklist these validators, removing them from the auction system. On several occasions, tens of validators were kicked out, with approximately six million Solana re-staked to compliant validators in a single epoch. Crucially, stakers felt no impact because the blacklisted validators' bonds covered their obligations.

The experience prompted Marinade to launch Marinade Select in April 2025, a product exclusively available to KYC-verified validators with established reputations. Currently featuring more than 30 validators, Select provides institutional users with certainty that their stake goes only to operators with years of track record and verified compliance status.

Current State of MEV and Sandwich Attacks

The sandwich attack conversation has notably quieted since the intense debates of 2024, when the Solana Foundation ejected validators from their delegation program and Jito implemented its own blacklisting mechanisms. When asked whether the problem has been solved or simply faded from public attention, Repetný offered a nuanced assessment.

"To tell you the truth, we are not seeing much as the data tells us," he said. Current tooling shows fewer than five validators engaged in sandwiching, suggesting the problem has largely disappeared. However, Repetný cautioned that this might reflect adversarial adaptation rather than true resolution. "They all kind of adapted, they use more sophisticated ways of doing those attacks," he noted, pointing to discussions of "probabilistic sandwiches" that operate over longer timeframes and are harder to detect definitively.

Max Resnick from Anza, appearing on a previous Lightspeed episode, had suggested that Solana's improved efficiency reduces transaction leakage because users don't need to "spray" transactions to multiple validators hoping for inclusion. Repetný agreed this likely contributes to the improved picture, along with generally compressed MEV and priority fees across the network—now at some of their lowest levels since the metric began being tracked.

Competing for ETF Staking Mandates

The conversation turned to what may be the most consequential business opportunity in Solana staking: serving as the staking provider for upcoming Solana ETFs. Marinade has already secured the staking mandate for Canary's Solana ETF, positioning the protocol as a legitimate contender in what Repetný described as an intensely competitive landscape.

The institutional staking market operates fundamentally differently from retail. "That market segment does not follow yield as much as the retail part of it," Repetný explained. "Compliance and security comes first, and then yield." ETF issuers conduct extensive due diligence, examining historical performance, operational security, and regulatory compliance before any yield optimization discussions begin.

The competition is formidable. Multi-chain node operators that already serve Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs have established relationships with asset managers. These operators benefit from economies of scale, existing legal agreements, and the convenience of offering validators across thirty or more chains. Major exchanges like Coinbase, with their built-in custody solutions and staking infrastructure, represent another competitive threat.

The Advantages of Validator Diversification

Marinade's pitch to institutional clients centers on diversification and yield optimization. Rather than concentrating stake with a single validator—creating both operational and centralization risks—Marinade distributes delegation across a curated set of compliant operators. "Even for the ETF, it's better to diversify the stake across more validators than just stick to one," Repetný argued, noting that different institutions have varying requirements around geographic distribution, SOC 2 compliance, and other criteria.

The community validator angle serves both the Solana ecosystem and Marinade's business case. Without aggregated institutional stake flowing through Marinade, many mid-sized and smaller validators would have no access to ETF-related delegation whatsoever. "Those community validators would never ever be able to get this delegation from those ETFs and ETPs" without Marinade's intermediation, Repetný pointed out.

The protocol has achieved meaningful distribution partnerships, now integrated with BitGo, Copper, Zodiac, and additional qualified custodians on the roadmap. Marinade Select, the KYC-verified validator product, already has close to one million Solana staked through more than 30 community validators. Bitwise has also begun using Marinade's decentralized system for their European ETP product.

The Reality of TVL Deals

Repetný acknowledged that some ETF mandates have effectively been won through what amount to TVL deals—well-capitalized validators seeding ETF products with their own treasury funds in exchange for exclusive staking arrangements. As a bootstrapped company without venture capital backing, Marinade cannot compete on these terms. Instead, the protocol leads with transparency and yield optimization.

"At the end of the day, if you meet it on the safety, security, compliance standards, then it comes down to the number two criteria, which is the yield," Repetný explained. Because Marinade operates as a competitive marketplace rather than running its own validators, the bidding dynamics should consistently produce higher yields than single-validator arrangements. Additionally, the diversification provides resilience—if one validator experiences issues, the impact on overall returns is minimized.

DATs: Opportunity or Competition?

The discussion also covered Solana DATs (Digital Asset Treasuries)—publicly traded companies like Sol Strategies that hold large amounts of Solana on their balance sheets. With more than 17-18 such entities now operating and controlling an estimated 4-5% of Solana's supply, DATs represent both potential customers and competitive pressure for staking providers.

Many DATs operate their own validators, capturing staking rewards directly rather than paying fees to external providers. However, Repetný questioned whether this approach truly optimizes returns. "Is it worth the cost of the infrastructure trying to run your own validator? And do you really make the best yield if you're only using your own node versus trying to use the market's best?" Running validator infrastructure costs approximately $5,000 monthly in hardware and voting fees, so the economics only work for sufficiently large holdings.

DATs may be more flexible than ETFs regarding DeFi participation and other activities, potentially making them early adopters of innovative staking products. Repetný mentioned that UPC had begun partially using Marinade, and discussions were ongoing with Apex's team regarding their planned $2 billion DAT raise.

Private Validators: The 25% Nobody Talks About

One of the most surprising revelations involved private validators—those operating at 100% commission, meaning all staking rewards go to the validator operator rather than delegators. These represent approximately 25% of all staked Solana, a proportion far higher than most observers would expect.

The mechanics are straightforward: an institution or individual spins up their own validator, stakes their holdings to themselves, and captures not only inflation rewards but also 100% of priority fees and any other validator revenue. This setup is particularly attractive for foundation grants and large holdings where the stake itself came with restrictions—capturing yield through a 100% commission validator keeps rewards separate from restricted principal tokens.

Some private validators exist for reasons beyond pure economics. Fire Dancer development, for instance, likely involves Jump's team running private validators for testing purposes. And in one colorful aside, Repetný noted that a lawsuit involving a Solana co-founder centered on allegations of staking an ex-spouse's Solana to a 100% fee validator without disclosure.

The current yield advantage of private validators over standard zero-commission options amounts to roughly 30-50 basis points from captured priority fees—lower than the 150 basis points seen during higher-activity periods, but still meaningful for large holdings. Marinade's stake auction marketplace attempts to capture some of this value for regular stakers, but the private validator option remains attractive for entities willing to bear infrastructure costs.

Token Economics and Buybacks

Marinade recently implemented a significant change to its tokenomics through a governance proposal brought forward by a community member from the Czech Family Office, one of the protocol's early advisors. The changes, implemented in late summer 2024, restructured how protocol fees flow through the system.

Previously, the disposition of protocol revenue was less transparent. Under the new model, 100% of protocol fees—captured from validator bids in the stake auction marketplace—accrue to the protocol treasury. These funds split evenly: 50% goes to on-chain governance reserves controlled by MNDE token holders, while 50% funds a continuous buyback program publicly announced and verifiable on-chain.

The buyback program has been running for approximately two months and has already acquired more than two million MNDE tokens from protocol revenues. At current run rates, Repetný estimated the program would purchase between 4-5% of MNDE supply annually, creating consistent buy pressure that supports token value.

Repetný framed the buyback decision as balancing value capture against continued development. "Most of the initial fees that were running through Marinade, we would reinvest in more protocol building," he explained. The current phase represents a maturation where sufficient revenue exists to simultaneously fund development and return value to token holders.

Recipe: Staking Rewards in Stablecoin

Looking ahead, Marinade plans to launch a product called Recipe in Q4 2025, addressing a specific use case the team observed among private validators. Some institutions operate private validators specifically to convert staking rewards into stablecoins automatically, hedging against Solana price volatility while maintaining predictable cash flows in dollar terms.

Recipe will enable this workflow for native stakers without requiring them to operate their own infrastructure. Users stake Solana through Marinade's native product—without smart contract risk—and receive staking rewards denominated in a stablecoin rather than SOL. The team is currently evaluating stablecoin partners for the initial launch.

This product exemplifies Marinade's strategy of identifying valuable workflows currently available only to sophisticated operators and democratizing access to them. Just as the stake auction marketplace made institutional-grade commission deals available to retail users, Recipe will bring private-validator-style yield conversion to everyday stakers.

The Solana Startup Incubator Experience

Despite operating for several years, Marinade participated in the Solana Startup Incubator in early 2025—a decision that might seem unusual for an established protocol. Repetný explained the rationale as twofold: geographic exposure and institutional validation.

Most Marinade contributors are based in Europe, while the majority of institutional business, particularly post-election, originates in the United States. The three-month incubator residency in New York provided essential access to asset managers, family offices, and other institutional players who form Marinade's target market. The Solana team facilitated numerous meetings that generated invaluable feedback and shaped the protocol's institutional product roadmap.

"I would recommend it to anyone, even someone advanced thinking that they are advanced," Repetný concluded about the incubator experience. The opportunity to receive direct feedback from target customers in a concentrated timeframe proved valuable regardless of the team's existing experience level.

The Future Vision: Blurring Native and Liquid Staking

When asked about what excites him most about Solana staking's future, Repetný painted a picture of traditional finance being revolutionized by blockchain infrastructure. As crypto increasingly powers financial services, he sees analogs to checking and savings accounts emerging—with staking representing the savings account primitive.

"What excites me is to blur the lines between the two worlds," Repetný explained, referring to liquid staking and native staking. Currently, native staking provides security and simplicity but assets remain locked and unusable. Liquid staking provides flexibility but introduces smart contract risk and compliance complexity.

The ideal future product would combine the safety of native staking with the utility of liquid assets. "You could borrow against it, you could maybe leverage through it, you can use it as margin account for trading," Repetný envisioned. This would require technical innovation to make natively staked assets function as collateral without introducing the pooling and smart contract concerns that currently limit institutional adoption.

Regulatory Uncertainty and the ETF Timeline

A shadow over the entire conversation was the current regulatory environment. Despite optimism around a potential Solana ETF approval, Repetný noted that ETF issuers have not heard from the SEC since the government shutdown began. This uncertainty affects not only the timing of potential approvals but also the competitive dynamics among staking providers vying for mandates.

The regulatory pause creates both challenges and opportunities. On one hand, extended delays reduce the urgency for ETF-related business development. On the other hand, the additional time allows protocols like Marinade to further strengthen their compliance credentials, expand custody integrations, and demonstrate sustained performance track records that will matter in due diligence processes.

The Centralization Risk Paradox

Underlying much of Marinade's institutional strategy is a concern about centralization risk. If large ETFs and institutional investors all delegate to the same small set of validators—whether exchanges like Coinbase or multi-chain operators with existing relationships—Solana's decentralization suffers. This is precisely the problem Marinade was founded to address, diversifying stake away from concentrated positions that could threaten network security.

The irony is that institutional capital, which Solana needs for mainstream adoption and ecosystem growth, could paradoxically undermine the decentralization that gives the network its value proposition. Marinade positions itself as the solution to this tension—a way for institutions to participate in staking while maintaining appropriate diversification across the validator set.

"Without Marinade... those community validators would never ever be able to get this delegation from those ETFs and ETPs," Repetný emphasized. The protocol serves as an intermediary that aligns institutional requirements with ecosystem health, directing capital to validators that need it while maintaining the compliance standards institutions require.

Lessons from Four Years of Building

Throughout the conversation, several themes emerged about building successful infrastructure on Solana. The decision to bootstrap rather than take venture capital gave Marinade independence that proved valuable when facing acquisition pressure from better-funded competitors. The willingness to cannibalize their own liquid staking product by launching native staking demonstrated responsiveness to market feedback rather than ideological attachment to a particular approach.

Perhaps most importantly, the team's pivot from retail-focused DeFi protocol to institutional infrastructure provider shows the adaptability required for long-term success. The skills needed to attract retail users clicking buttons in a web app differ dramatically from those required to navigate institutional due diligence processes lasting months. Marinade's participation in the Solana incubator, despite being an established protocol, demonstrated humility about gaps in their go-to-market capabilities.

The Marinade story also highlights the network effects within Solana's ecosystem. Early contributors went on to found critical infrastructure like Triton. Relationships forged during hackathons became the foundation for competitive mergers that strengthened the protocol. The tight-knit nature of Solana's builder community created opportunities unavailable in more fragmented ecosystems.

As Solana staking enters its next phase—with ETF approval potentially imminent and institutional capital waiting on the sidelines—protocols like Marinade will play a crucial role in determining whether that capital strengthens or undermines the network's decentralization. The choices made by ETF issuers about staking providers, and by staking providers about which validators receive delegation, will shape Solana's infrastructure for years to come.

Facts + Figures

• Marinade's TVL: Currently sits at approximately 10.5 million SOL, split evenly between liquid staking (MSOL) and native staking products

• Liquid Staking Adoption: Only 10% of staked Solana is in liquid staking tokens (up from approximately 6% a year or two ago), while 90% remains in native staking

• Initial Funding: Marinade was bootstrapped with an $88,000 grant from Solana and Serum Foundation, rejecting all VC investment

• Private Validators: Approximately 25% of staked Solana (around 100 million SOL) sits with 100% commission private validators, roughly 100 validators out of 1,000 total

• Validator Infrastructure Costs: Running a validator costs approximately $5,000 per month for hardware and voting fees

• MNDE Buybacks: The buyback program has acquired more than 2 million MNDE tokens in approximately two months, with projections of 4-5% annual supply buyback

• Marinade Select: The KYC-verified validator product launched in April 2025 with more than 30 validators and close to 1 million SOL staked

• Protocol Fee Distribution: 100% of protocol fees now accrue to the protocol, with 50% going to on-chain governance treasury and 50% to buybacks

• Priority Fee Yield: Currently represents approximately 30-50 basis points annualized (down from 150 basis points during high activity periods)

• Sandwich Attack Cleanup: On one occasion, approximately 6 million SOL was re-staked away from malicious validators in a single epoch

• Custody Integrations: Marinade is now integrated with BitGo, Copper, Zodiac, with additional qualified custodians on the roadmap

• ETF Mandate: Marinade serves as the staking provider for Canary's Solana ETF

• DAT Market: More than 17-18 publicly traded Solana Digital Asset Treasuries exist, controlling an estimated 4-5% of SOL supply

• MSOL Fees: MSOL now has 0% performance fee after the stake auction marketplace launch shifted the fee model to validators

• Upcoming Product: "Recipe" launching in Q4 2025 will enable native stakers to receive rewards in stablecoin rather than SOL

Questions Answered

What is the difference between liquid staking and native staking on Solana?

Liquid staking involves depositing SOL to receive a liquid staking token (like MSOL) that can be used in DeFi while still earning staking rewards, but requires trusting smart contract code. Native staking eliminates smart contract risk entirely by sitting on top of Solana's built-in delegation mechanism, where users maintain withdrawal authority while only the stake authority is assigned to the staking provider. Marinade Native, launched two years ago, allows users to diversify stake across 100+ validators without smart contract exposure. Currently, 90% of staked Solana uses native staking while only 10% is in liquid staking tokens.

How does Marinade's Stake Auction Marketplace work?

The Stake Auction Marketplace is a competitive bidding system where validators deposit bonds (called Protected Staking Rewards bonds) and bid for stake allocation by specifying how much they'll pay per 1,000 SOL delegated to them. Marinade's system analyzes bids and allocates stake to maximize returns for stakers, taking a cut from bid flow while passing the majority back to delegators. This mechanism forces transparency into validator economics and gives retail stakers access to preferential rates previously available only to large whales through off-chain deals. The marketplace also captures priority fee value that validators would otherwise keep entirely.

How is Marinade competing for ETF staking mandates?

Marinade competes for ETF business by emphasizing compliance, security, and yield optimization through validator diversification rather than single-validator concentration. The protocol has achieved SOC 2 audit certification, integrated with major qualified custodians like BitGo and Copper, and launched Marinade Select with 30+ KYC-verified validators. Unlike multi-chain node operators with existing ETF relationships or well-capitalized validators that can seed ETF products with their own treasury funds, Marinade leads with transparent yield optimization through its competitive marketplace. The protocol has already secured the staking mandate for Canary's Solana ETF.

What happened with sandwich attacking validators in Marinade's system?

When Marinade launched its permissionless Stake Auction Marketplace, malicious validators engaged in sandwich attacks could participate and outbid honest operators using their ill-gotten profits. After initially hoping the network would solve this at the protocol level, Marinade worked with researchers like the Ghost team to identify bad actors and ran governance proposals to blacklist them. Tens of validators were removed on multiple occasions, with approximately 6 million SOL re-staked in a single epoch without stakers feeling any impact thanks to the bond system covering obligations. This led to Marinade Select, a KYC-only product launched in April 2025.

Why do 25% of staked SOL sit with private validators?

Private validators running at 100% commission capture all staking rewards for themselves, including priority fees that normal delegators cannot access. This setup is particularly attractive for institutions with large holdings, foundation grant recipients who want to separate yield from restricted principal, and entities needing predictable validator performance. The yield advantage amounts to roughly 30-50 basis points currently from captured priority fees. The arrangement requires approximately $5,000 monthly in infrastructure costs, making it economical only for sufficiently large holdings.

What is Marinade's new Recipe product?

Recipe, launching in Q4 2025, will enable native stakers to receive their staking rewards in stablecoin rather than SOL. This addresses a use case currently available only to operators of private validators: hedging against SOL price volatility while maintaining predictable dollar-denominated cash flows. Users stake through Marinade's native product without smart contract risk, and rewards are automatically converted to stablecoin. The team is currently evaluating stablecoin partners for the initial launch, continuing Marinade's pattern of democratizing workflows previously available only to sophisticated operators.

How does Marinade's token buyback program work?

Following a governance proposal in late summer 2024, 100% of Marinade's protocol fees now accrue to the protocol rather than being distributed elsewhere. These funds split evenly: 50% goes to on-chain governance reserves controlled by MNDE holders, while 50% funds a continuous, publicly verifiable buyback program. In approximately two months of operation, the program has acquired more than 2 million MNDE tokens, projecting to annual purchases of 4-5% of total supply. This represents a maturation of the protocol's economics where sufficient revenue exists to simultaneously fund development and return value to token holders.

Why did Marinade join the Solana Startup Incubator despite being an established protocol?

Marinade joined the incubator for geographic exposure and institutional relationship building. Most contributors are based in Europe while institutional business predominantly originates in the US, especially post-election. The three-month New York residency provided concentrated access to asset managers, family offices, and institutional players. The Solana team facilitated numerous meetings that generated valuable feedback shaping Marinade's institutional products. Repetný recommends the experience even for established teams, as the direct customer feedback proves valuable regardless of existing experience level.