GM. This is Milk Road PRO, the backhoe of crypto newsletters (we do the digging for you).
Everyone keeps asking when altcoin season will arrive. The answer? It already has. If you are not seeing it, chances are you are sitting in the wrong tokens. 😠
The tokens that are moving right now all have one thing in common — they fit into one of two categories:
- Projects getting a wave of fresh money from public markets through digital asset treasuries (DATs). That is the Saylor playbook, and you can see the impact in $ETH and more recently $SOL.
- Projects running aggressive buybacks that keep steady pressure on the price. Just look at what is happening with $PUMP and $HYPE.
Everything else? Just drifting sideways.
Now imagine a project that fits into both categories:
- Its revenues are denominated in the same asset Wall Street cannot stop buying — $SOL
- And it pushes 50% of those revenues straight into buybacks
And here’s the kicker: the market has barely noticed.
Sounds great, but for buybacks to really move the needle, they have to be big.
👉 The larger the buybacks are compared to market cap, the stronger the buying pressure becomes, and that’s what sends the price climbing.
And on top of that, this project just burned 30% of its total supply — a move designed to bring down the market cap vs FDV ratio, which can often spook investors.
The project is Marinade Finance, a pioneer in liquid staking on Solana – and we’ll dive deeper with a full introduction a bit later – but what matters right now are their numbers.
Today they pull in around 55K $SOL in annualized revenue, which at today’s price works out to about $12M annualized and about $6.5M in buybacks.
If $SOL climbs higher, their revenue grows right along with it. But to really see why this matters, we have to look at it in relation to their market cap.
Their reported market cap on Coingecko is $70M, which gives them a revenue multiple of 5.3 and a buyback multiple of 10.7 — right in line with Hyperliquid ($HYPE) numbers.
So what does that actually mean?
If everything else stayed the same, they’d be buying back 9.2% of the circulating supply every year.
And here’s something spicy:
While looking into Marinade, we found that the market cap listed on Coingecko isn’t accurate — something Marinade’s team confirmed to us directly.
👉 The real market cap right now is closer to $55M.
So overall this looks like a strong opportunity, but there’s still a lot more to dig into:
- Why is their $mSOL token losing market share?
- What makes their new product unique?
- How big is their growth potential?
- What are the key risks and challenges?
- And is $MNDE a good investment right now?
Without further ado, let’s dive in.
INTRODUCTION TO MARINADE
Marinade Finance is a leading staking protocol within the Solana ecosystem.
It was born during the Solana x Serum hackathon in March 2021, when two teams joined forces to create the first liquid staking protocol on Solana.
By August of that same year, the project was live on Solana’s mainnet.
What makes Marinade stand out is how it started.
Instead of taking the usual VC funding route or doing private sales, the team bootstrapped their way forward with about $80K in grants from the Solana Foundation and Project Serum.
From there, they quickly gained traction by tackling two big challenges: decentralization and staking complexity.
👉 Marinade made it simple to delegate staking across a wide set of validators and give people access to native staking via their liquid staking token $mSOL.
We’ll dive deeper into their product in just a moment, but first, let’s look at some key stats.
Here’s a quick snapshot of where Marinade stands today (note – we’ll update the first figure based on what we learned from the Marinade team later on in the report):
- Market Cap: $71M
- FDV: $90M
- TVL: $10.4M $SOL, which at the time of writing is worth $2.3B
- Treasury: $220K (excluding $MNDE)
- Team Size: 30 people
- Products: 3
One number really stands out: their treasury balance is just $220K, and it's all in $mSOL — not even in stablecoins.
Having a team of 25+ people with such a low balance is risky, but we will talk about that a bit later.
Now we want to break down what Marinade actually brings to the market and how they turn that into revenue.
PRODUCTS
As we mentioned earlier, Marinade is all about staking on Solana.
If you're not too familiar with that topic, take a look at this report. We laid out our bullish case for liquid staking and broke it all down in simple terms.
Once you go through it, you'll have a solid grip on Solana staking, which will make the rest of this report a whole lot easier to follow.
By the way at the time we wrote that report, only 26 million $SOL were staked in liquid staking, but we expected that number to climb.
👉 Today, it's sitting at around 42 million $SOL. Safe to say, that prediction played out.
And with the recent launch of Solana DATs, we’re curious to see if the momentum will shift more toward native staking or stick with liquid staking – either way, Marinade offers both options.
So, we believe the trend toward more staking will continue. 🚀
But for now, let’s get back to Marinade.
They originally launched as a liquid staking provider only, but later expanded to include native staking too.
Today, they offer two main staking options:
- Liquid staking
- Native staking
We won’t go into all the details. We will just give you a high-level overview to help you understand Marinade’s main offerings.
Liquid staking
Liquid staking lets you earn 6-7% staking yield without locking up your $SOL tokens.
Here's how it works:
- You stake your $SOL using Marinade.
- You get a token back — in this case, $mSOL.
- That token keeps earning rewards over time, and its value goes up as a result.
The best part? You can still use that $mSOL while it’s earning:
- You can lend it.
- You can add it to liquidity pools.
- You can farm yields on platforms like Kamino.
So instead of letting your assets sit idle, you keep them working for you across DeFi.
We’ve already pointed out that liquid staking is growing, but unfortunately, that’s not the case for Marinade’s $mSOL.
As you can see, Marinade’s market share has been steadily declining almost the entire time.
From being the dominant player back in 2022, Marinade’s market share has now dropped to just 11%.
That naturally raises the question: what happened?
The answer’s actually pretty simple — competition.
Today, the space is dominated by big players with better products and/or massive distribution, like Jito, Jupiter, and Binance.
And if we zoom in on Marinade’s absolute numbers alone, the story’s the same — a steady downward trend.
Back in January 2022, Marinade had around 8.7 million $mSOL in circulation and was clearly leading the pack.
But since then, it’s been a challenge for them to keep bringing in new capital, and their TVL has been steadily declining to the current 4.6 million $mSOL.
The big question every investor should be asking right now is:
Can Marinade turn things around and win back some market share, or is this battle already lost?
Unfortunately, we’re leaning toward the view that this battle might be lost.
Marinade isn’t offering anything truly unique on the product side, and it’s also falling behind when it comes to distribution.
But as we mentioned, Marinade also offers native staking solutions — and this is where things get interesting!
Uh, Oh… 😧 The rest of this report is exclusive to Crypto PRO members!
Already a Crypto PRO member? Log in here.
WHAT’S LEFT INSIDE? 👀
- Marinade’s moat
- A closer look at $MNDE’s tokenomics
- Our valuation of Marinade as it stands today (along with key risks and challenges.)
Upgrade your subscription today to unlock access to all of the milky insights above, PLUS:
- Weekly reports to help you manage investments, allocate capital, take profits, and stay ahead in crypto 📊
- Weekly “Where Are We In The Cycle?” indicators to help you spot the bull market top before it’s too late 📈
- Access to the PRO Community, where the Milk Road crew & 1000s of fellow PROs talk crypto. Don’t miss the monthly live events! 🫂
Already a Crypto PRO member? Log in here.
WHAT CRYPTO PRO MEMBERS SAID LAST WEEK:
