EXPLAINER | A Look at Liquid Staking with Marinade Finance on Solana

Staking is a process where cryptocurrency holders lock up their assets to support the operations of a blockchain network, earning rewards in return.

However, traditional staking has limitations – the inability to utilize staked assets for other purposes while they are locked up. Liquid staking addresses this constraint by providing a flexible solution that allows users to convert their staked assets into fungible tokens, enabling liquidity and accessibility to a broader range of financial opportunities.

Liquid staking platforms, such as Marinade Finance, utilize advanced protocols to issue tokenized representations of staked assets. These tokens, often referred to as staked tokens, can be freely traded, lent, or used as collateral on decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.

Users benefit from the best of both worlds – participating in the network’s staking activities while retaining the flexibility to engage in a variety of decentralized financial activities.

Marinade Finance

Marinade Finance stands out as a leading player in the liquid staking arena, particularly on the Solana blockchain. Solana’s high throughput and low transaction costs make it an ideal environment for efficient and cost-effective liquid staking.

Users of Marinade can choose between staking natively or liquid stake SOL for mSOL, a liquid staking token. Either option stakes your SOL with Solana validators. When you stake your SOL tokens to a validator, you are contributing to the decentralization and performance of Solana. In return for staking your SOL with a validator, you receive rewards in SOL every 2-3 days.

Marinade lets you stake your SOL in exchange for mSOL, a liquid staking token that you can use as collateral in DeFi while still accruing the SOL staking rewards. The SOL that you are staking with Marinade is spread among more than 100 validators.

The following are the steps for staking SOL on Marinade Finance:

• Go to Marinade Finance
• Navigate to the https://marinade.finance/app/staking page
• Connect your Solana wallet
• In the ‘Stake’ section, enter the desired amount of SOL you want to stake
• Click the ‘Stake SOL’ button and confirm the transaction