Marinade Finance launched on Solana in August 2021 as the first liquid staking protocol on the chain. The concept was borrowed from Lido on Ethereum: stake SOL, receive a tradable token (mSOL) that represents your staked position, and use that token across DeFi while still earning staking rewards. It was an obvious idea and somehow nobody else had shipped it on Solana yet.
Marinade grew fast because of its delegation strategy. Instead of concentrating stake on a few large validators, Marinade spread it across more than 450 validators using an automated scoring system that prioritized decentralization, uptime, and commission rates. For smaller validators, Marinade became the reason they could survive. This made Marinade beloved by the Solana validator community — a moat that turned out to matter a lot later.
At its peak in 2022, Marinade had more than $1.5 billion in TVL. Then Jito launched, Jito captured MEV rewards that Marinade couldn’t match, and users migrated in droves. Marinade’s market share dropped from majority to minority over 18 months. The team responded with Marinade Native (a non-liquid staking product), Marinade Earn, and new yield mechanisms, but the liquid staking war was mostly over. JitoSOL had won.
Still, Marinade matters as the protocol that proved liquid staking could work on Solana. The MNDE token remains a governance asset, the Marinade DAO is one of the most active on Solana, and mSOL is still widely used as collateral across Kamino, Drift, and Raydium. If you’re studying Solana DeFi history, Marinade is where the story of yield-bearing assets on the chain begins. It built the on-ramp that JitoSOL later paved over.
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