Marinade Finance, one of the top protocols on the Solana blockchain, has announced the launch of Marinade Native, a new service that allows users to stake SOL tokens directly to validators. This eliminates the risk of swapping SOL for mSOL, the liquid staking token (LST), while still providing users with the expected yield of around 7%. With this new service, users retain custody of their SOL tokens, rather than receiving a yield-infused depository receipt.
Marinade Native is basically targeting the 50-times bigger market and hoping to see more decentralization within staking on Solana, said Michael Repetny, a core contributor to Marinade. This new service spreads the staked SOL across an index of top validators, rather than just one, a technique called automated staking. This is one of the two main benefits of the LST mechanism, alongside the part where it issues mSOL.
The risk of locking SOL into a liquid staking contract was demonstrated last November, when the collapse of FTX prompted a flight to safety across the Solana ecosystem, including in Marinade. This event highlighted the limitations of liquid staking, and the protocol is still recovering from the TVL rout it suffered during the incident.
Repetny also noted that there is about 60 million SOL locked in vesting contracts that cannot be put to work through liquid staking solutions, but can still earn yield using Marinade Native.