--- title: "Marinade (MNDE)" url: "https://caper.network/wiki/daos/staking/marinade" updated: 2026-09-01 license: CC-BY-4.0 license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Marinade (MNDE) | Project | Marinade Finance | | --- | --- | | Category | Liquid & native staking (Solana) | | Token | MNDE (governance) ยท mSOL (liquid-staking receipt) | | Chain | Solana | | Governance | Marinade DAO (mDAO) โ€” locked-MNDE voting on [Realms / SPL Governance](https://realms.today/) | | Launched | 2021 | | Status | ๐ŸŸข Active | | Website | [marinade.finance](https://marinade.finance) | **Marinade** is a stake-automation protocol on [Solana](https://solana.com) and one of the network's earliest and largest liquid-staking DAOs. It spreads a depositor's SOL across a competitively-selected set of validators and returns either a non-custodial native stake or the liquid receipt token **mSOL**. What makes Marinade a governance case study rather than just a staking product is that the _delegation itself_ is the thing being governed: which validators receive stake, and on what terms, is decided by an on-chain marketplace and by MNDE token-holders โ€” the [delegation-strategy-as-governance](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/voting-and-delegation) pattern. ## What Marinade is Marinade offers two ways to stake, both driven by the same validator-selection logic and paying rewards each Solana epoch (~2โ€“3 days): - **Marinade Native** โ€” a non-custodial delegation system where the SOL never leaves the user's own stake accounts; Marinade only sets the delegation. There is no receipt token and no smart-contract custody risk. - **Liquid staking (mSOL)** โ€” the user's SOL is pooled and they receive **mSOL**, a value-accruing token that can be redeployed across Solana DeFi ([Kamino](https://kamino.finance), [Orca](https://www.orca.so), [Raydium](https://raydium.io)) while continuing to earn staking rewards. Around these sit **Marinade Select** (a curated, verified validator set aimed at institutions), instant unstake (a liquidity pool that lets stakers exit without waiting for the epoch cooldown, for a fee), and protected staking-reward mechanisms. Marinade reports 150,000+ holders and has operated [since 2021](https://marinade.finance). ## The Stake Auction Marketplace (SAM) SAM is Marinade's distinctive mechanism and the clearest example of turning validator selection into an open market. Instead of a hand-tuned scoring formula deciding who gets stake, validators _bid_ for it in two ways: - **Static bids (CPMPE)** โ€” a fixed cost per 1,000 SOL delegated per epoch, paid out of the validator's on-chain _bond_. - **Dynamic commission bids** โ€” a basis-point share of the rewards the validator earns (inflation, [MEV](/wiki/daos/staking/jito), and block rewards) passed back to stakers, without changing the validator's public commission rate. Validators are ranked by `max_yield` โ€” the total yield they can offer stakers at a given stake level (commission plus bid). Marinade runs a **last-price (uniform-clearing) auction**: stake is allocated top-down until it runs out, and the `realized_yield` paid to everyone is set by the _lowest-ranked winning validator_. Validators who bid above that clearing price only pay enough to match it, not their full bid. A single validator is capped at **15% of Marinade's total stake** (set by [MIP-19](https://docs.marinade.finance/marinade-protocol/protocol-overview/stake-auction-market)) to preserve decentralization. The full mechanism is documented in the [SAM overview](https://docs.marinade.finance/marinade-protocol/protocol-overview/stake-auction-market). ## Governance: the Marinade DAO The **Marinade DAO (mDAO)** is constituted of MNDE holders who _lock_ their MNDE in governance; locked MNDE confers voting power and access to the token's utilities โ€” a vote-lock design in the same family as [vote-escrow tokenomics](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/vote-escrow), layered on top of [token-weighted voting](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/token-weighted-voting). Voting runs on-chain through [Realms](https://realms.today/) and [SPL-Governance](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/frameworks/spl-governance), so proposal rules are enforced by smart contracts and the record is public. Marinade Improvement Proposals (MIPs) set the parameters that matter โ€” the SAM per-validator cap, bond and commission rules, treasury use, and product changes โ€” which keeps the delegation policy accountable to token-holders rather than to a closed operator. MNDE has a 700M maximum supply. ## Where Marinade fits Marinade is the pure liquid-staking-DAO archetype on Solana, distinct from its network sibling [Jito](/wiki/daos/staking/jito), which pairs its JitoSOL LST with an MEV block-engine and tip market. On Ethereum the closest analogues are [Lido](/wiki/daos/staking/lido-dao) (dominant-share LST with an off-chain operator set), [Rocket Pool](/wiki/daos/staking/rocket-pool) (permissionless node operators), and [ether.fi](/wiki/daos/staking/ether-fi) โ€” and, one layer out, [EigenLayer](/wiki/daos/staking/eigenlayer)'s restaking. Marinade's contribution to the design space is the _auction_: it replaces a governed scoring formula with a market that lets validators compete on yield, which is a cleaner answer to the "who decides where the stake goes, and can they be captured" question that [sinks many DAOs](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/how-daos-fail). ## How Caper approaches this Marinade's design answers a question Caper answers differently: how do you keep the people steering a pool of value honest? Marinade uses an open auction plus locked-MNDE voting; a [caper](/wiki/foundations/what-is-a-caper) instead makes _leaving_ the discipline. Governance weight is not raw token balance but a participation-weighted figure โ€” the canonical formula `w = (t ยท v) / (V ยท T)` multiplies a member's holdings by the soulbound record `v` they have actually accrued โ€“ one per ranked ballot cast, plus 0.01 per XRD of gross value on each leg of a trade โ€“ so a bag that arrived by transfer, never traded and never voted, captures no control (verified against `compute_vote_weight` in `contracts/common/src/lib.rs`). And any member can always [exit](/blog/the-exit-right), redeeming a pro-rata slice of the treasury sized by that same vote weight (the `exit` path in `contracts/logic/src/lib.rs` requires both the governance and the soulbound vote token, and computes the share pre-burn). Where Marinade leans on markets and vote-locks to align a delegation strategy, Caper leans on a credible, always-open exit to keep a treasury's stewards accountable. See [how Caper proposals work](/wiki/governance/proposals).