Marinade Select has also been named the exclusive staking provider for Canary’s SOL ETF.
Marinade Labs announced the launch of Marinade Select today, May 21 – a new staking marketplace built for institutional clients interested in staking on the Solana network.
The DeFi protocol also announced that Canary Capital has selected Marinade Select as its exclusive staking solution. Marinade says it is the first staking provider to be named in a U.S. Solana ETF filing. Earlier this week, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) delaying its decision on a number of spot Solana exchange-traded fund (ETF) proposals, including from Canary Capital, seeking comments.
The team behind Marinade – Solana’s sixth-largest protocol with $1.8 billion in total value locked (TVL) – says the platform offers institutional investors a more streamlined entryway into staking via a curated group of validators, according to a press release viewed by The Defiant.
Unlike Marinade’s open validator model, Marinade Select is designed for institutional clients in particular, with a focus on security and compliance. The new product features a group of 30 to 40 validators to “maintain decentralization and network diversity.” The validators are chosen based on performance and alignment with compliance standards.
“All validators will be known legal entities and go through KYC onboarding,” Hadley Stern, Chief Commercial Officer at Marinade Labs, told The Defiant. “It’s part of a comprehensive compliance program, appealing to institutions seeking greater assurance around compliance, performance, and security.”
The move comes amid broader concerns about increasing centralization across blockchain networks, particularly as more institutional players enter the space.
“The institutional market is moving to single big validators – similar to Coinbase being the only custodian for Bitcoin ETFs, this is bad for Solana decentralization,” Stern told The Defiant:
“With Marinade Select, we are opening up the initial market to professional validators who don’t have the market approach to sell to institutions while solving an institutional pain point around contingency providers and the need to spread risk.”
Through a non-custodial framework, institutional stakers can use Marinade Select to retain control over their SOL while new delegations are distributed across the validator set.
“Marinade Select helps the underlying network maintain decentralization and allows institutions to participate in securing the Solana network by easily delegating to multiple validators at once,” Repetný said. “This makes the Solana ecosystem more resilient as opposed to centralized exchange staking, which is often the default on other chains.”
Solana is also notable for its ability to process thousands of transactions per second at a fraction of a penny, Repetný explained. Currently SOL is trading near $169, up 2% today and 22% this month.
Most recently, Marinade integrated with digital asset trust company BitGo to expand its Solana staking offerings to institutions.
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