The Future of Staking On Solana | Michael Repetný
🎯 Summary
Podcast Episode Summary: The Future of Staking On Solana | Michael Repetný (Marinade Labs)
This 65-minute episode features an in-depth conversation with Michael Repetný, CEO of Marinade Labs, focusing on the evolution, strategy, and future of staking infrastructure on the Solana blockchain, particularly contrasting liquid staking with native staking solutions.
1. Focus Area
The discussion centers on Solana Staking Infrastructure and Decentralized Finance (DeFi). Key topics include the origin and evolution of Marinade, the mechanics of liquid staking tokens (LSTs) like mSOL, the development of native staking solutions (Marinade Native), validator economics, and the strategic pivot toward institutional adoption.
2. Key Technical Insights
- Marinade Native Architecture: This product was specifically designed to eliminate smart contract risk associated with LSTs by diversifying stake across numerous validators while maintaining separation of power, ensuring Marinade itself cannot touch the underlying SOL.
- Stake Auction Marketplace Mechanics: Marinade introduced a system where validators bid for stake delegation. Marinade takes a cut from the flow of these bids (which represent shared upside like priority fees or MEV capture), allowing validators to compete for stake by sharing value back with stakers, thus maximizing staker yield.
- MEV/Priority Fee Capture Awareness: The conversation highlighted that validators were capturing significant value (equivalent to 1-2% annualized yield) through priority fees without stakers being aware, which motivated Marinade to create mechanisms to bring this value back to the staker pool.
3. Market/Investment Angle
- Native Staking Dominance on Solana: Despite the theoretical advantages of liquid staking, 90% of staked SOL remains in native staking, indicating a strong market preference for avoiding smart contract risk, especially among institutional players.
- LST Saturation vs. Native Opportunity: The liquid staking market on Solana is highly crowded (with many LSTs), capturing only about 10% of the total staked supply. Marinade sees significantly more growth potential in the native staking segment.
- Institutional Adoption Hurdles: Attracting institutions requires extensive effort, including SOC2 audits, compliance checks, legal structuring, and long-term relationship building, which is vastly different from the self-service retail DeFi model.
4. Notable Companies/People
- Marinade Labs/Michael Repetný: The core focus, detailing their journey from a hackathon project to a major Solana staking provider.
- Solana Foundation/Serum Foundation: Provided early critical funding ($80k grant) that allowed Marinade to bootstrap post-hackathon.
- Triton (Marco): One of the current co-founders of Triton (an RPC provider) was an early core contributor to Marinade via a merger with another hackathon project, Smartpool.
- Lido: Mentioned as the primary playbook/competitor for liquid staking that Marinade initially sought to emulate.
5. Regulatory/Policy Discussion
The discussion touched upon compliance as a major factor for institutional adoption. Institutions face hurdles related to tax triggers associated with converting SOL to LSDs and concerns over pooling assets with unknown participants, making native staking often preferable from a compliance standpoint.
6. Future Implications
The conversation suggests the Solana staking future will be characterized by a bifurcation:
- Liquid Staking (mSOL): Will continue to serve users prioritizing immediate DeFi composability, though the market is saturated.
- Native Staking (Marinade Native): Is expected to capture the majority of future growth, driven by institutions and risk-averse users who prioritize security and maximizing yield through diversified, non-custodial delegation.
7. Target Audience
This episode is highly valuable for Solana ecosystem participants, DeFi infrastructure developers, staking service providers, institutional crypto investors, and product managers focused on decentralized finance and asset security.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
💬 Key Insights
"You capture the priority fees, which cannot be captured by staking in a native way unless you stake with Marinade because we did this stake auction marketplace that allows to share the priority fees to stakers."
"And when it happens, it creates this centralization risk again, which is exactly the point what we were fighting against when we started Marinade, trying to diversify to many validators and skip the biggest."
"I would call it maybe the number one thing is compliance and security for all those asset managers and ETFs. That's first. So compliance, security comes first. And then yield only."
"When it happens, it creates this centralization risk again, which is exactly the point what we were fighting against when we started Marinade, trying to diversify to many validators and skip the biggest."
"Katana is an L2 built for DeFi and it's pioneering the ecosystem category of productive TVL, believing that change should be graded on how efficiently assets are put to work in DeFi rather than just total value locked."
"Our take is that what cannot be eliminated should be at least distributed back to users. And that's what's been happening. I think that's what is still happening with the Marinade stake auction marketplace..."