Marinade is a decentralized staking platform native to Solana, allowing anyone to earn yield on their SOL by delegating their tokens to a network of blockchain validators
Marinade allows users to earn staking rewards without locking assets or maintaining staking infrastructure. Users deposit their SOL into Benqi's smart contracts and receive mSOL in return that represent an active balance of the user's staked SOL along with any staking rewards accrued or penalties inflicted on validators. Users can withdraw or redeem their mSOL back for their original SOL at any time, but must wait the unbonding period (1-2 epochs) before claiming..
Marinade generates revenue by charging a 6% fee on the staking rewards earned by depositors. This fee includes the delegator fee paid to the underlying validators. As such, the protocol's revenue is driven by the fee charged, the amount of assets staked, and the yield earned by validators. Marinade also offers an instant unstaking feature that charges a fee that varies between 0.3% and 3%, depending on the total liquidity available in the Marinande pool and the amount to unstake.
Passive SOL holders can generate additional yield by participating in the PoS validation mechanism to earn block rewards. The unlocked liquidity with mSOL can also be used on a number of popular DeFi protocols to generate additional yield.