What Is Solana? The Ultimate Guide to the Solana Ecosystem

Marinade is a liquid staking solution on Solana. The Marinade finance protocol enables SOL token holders to stake their tokens to hundreds of validators with an algorithm based on a delegation strategy set by the Solana foundation designed to secure and decentralize the blockchain. Stakers at Marinade receive mSOL, a tokenized version of staked SOL designed to be pegged to the value of SOL and be widely adopted throughout the Solana DeFi ecosystem. mSOL holders earn yield from their SOL tokens through mSOL and also have the ability to earn additional yield through Solana ecosystem protocols that support mSOL.

Marinade is a DAO and MNDE is the governance token. MNDE enables token holders to take part in the governance of the Marinade protocol and treasury. 

Marinade was founded in March, 2021 following a third-place finish in the Solana x Serum Hackathon. The company was funded by grants through the Solana Foundation and Serum and no venture capital. The Marinade protocol's mainnet launched August 2, 2021 on [Marinade.Finance](http://marinade.finance/). The MNDE token began publicly trading on October 7, 2021 after the start of Marinade’s liquidity mining program. 

## How many MNDE tokens are in circulation?

As of January 2022, 64,429,067 MNDE have been distributed through [liquidity mining]([https://docs.marinade.finance/tokenomics/liquidity-mining](https://docs.marinade.finance/tokenomics/liquidity-mining)) or as [retroactive rewards]([https://docs.marinade.finance/tokenomics/retroactive-rewards](https://docs.marinade.finance/tokenomics/retroactive-rewards)) to early users of the Marinade protocol. There is a maximum supply of 1 billion MNDE and the circulating supply can be monitored on this [page]([https://stats.marinade.finance/](https://stats.marinade.finance/)). You can read more on our [tokenomics]([https://docs.marinade.finance/tokenomics](https://docs.marinade.finance/tokenomics)) page.

Marinade

SolFlare

Backpack

Phantom

Solana

dogwifhat

Bonk

Jupiter

Pyth Network

Lido Staked SOL

Guacamole

Brett

Baby

Tongue Cat

Gigachad

Dede

Golazo

LessFnGas

1INTRO

CatWifHat

Ligma Node

Koala AI

PunkAI

Cat of Elon

Jito Network is a major contributor to the Solana ecosystem through its JitoSOL liquid staking pool, and its collection of MEV products.

Users can exchange their SOL for JitoSOL. In return, holders maintain SOL’s liquidity and DeFi opportunities while earning yield from staking. JitoSOL uniquely provides its holders with additional rewards from transaction revenue associated with MEV extraction on Solana.

Maximum extractable value (MEV) describes profit opportunities attributable to the specific order of transaction execution. For example, a large swap on Orca can lower the pool’s price below that of Raydium or Serum. Traders will race to profit from that price difference and this arbitrage is considered MEV.

The Jito Foundation was created to minimize the negative impacts of MEV, equitably distribute the profits and increase transparency. Jito published an open source validator client designed to create a competitive market for MEV extraction. The client enables auctions within each block for the opportunity to capture that block’s MEV. Traders submit bids, and the highest bidders within each block can harvest available MEV.

Jito

Raydium is an automated market maker (AMM) and liquidity provider built on the Solana blockchain for the Serum decentralized exchange (DEX). Unlike any other AMMs, Raydium provides on-chain liquidity to a central limit orderbook meaning that funds deposited into Raydium are converted into limit orders which sit on Serum’s orderbooks. This gives Raydium LPs access to all of Serum’s order flow as well as their existing liquidity.
RAY is the native utility token used for:

Staking to earn protocol fees

Staking to receive IDO allocations

Governance votes on protocol decisions

Raydium

Pendle

Akash Network

Neon EVM

Echelon Prime

Maple

Centrifuge is a decentralized asset financing protocol. It connects decentralized finance (DeFi) with real-world assets (RWA) while trying to lower the cost of capital for small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) and provide investors with a stable source of income. The main goal of the project is to generate profits that are not tied to volatile crypto assets; the developers are pursuing the task of transferring real monetary value from fiat to cryptocurrencies.

Companies are using Centrifuge to access the liquidity that DeFi has to offer. They can tokenize real assets and use these tokens as collateral to access financing through Tinlake, a decentralized application (DApp) lending protocol. The Centrifuge blockchain is built on Polkadot (DOT) for speed and low fees, while its financial DApp Tinlake is built to access Ethereum (ETH) liquidity.

Centrifuge provides liquidity to everyone and investors receive income and rewards in the form of CFG tokens. Centrifuge links assets such as invoices, real estate and royalties with decentralized finance (DeFi). Additionally, borrowers benefit from the fact that they can finance their real assets without banks or other intermediaries.

Centrifuge

AIOZ Network

Gains Network

Ronin is an EVM blockchain specifically forged for gaming. Launched by Sky Mavis, the creator of Web3’s breakout title Axie Infinity which has generated over $1.3B in revenue, Ronin is the only blockchain proven to scale a single game to accommodate millions of daily active users and has processed over $4B in NFT volumes. Ronin optimizes for near-instant transactions and negligible fees that enable millions of in-game transactions to occur seamlessly, making it the leading choice for Web3 games.

In its first nine months, Ronin has racked up 250,000 unique daily active addresses, $5 billion in TVL, over 2 million wallet downloads, and 15% of all NFT transactions on the market. Its DEX Katana is the second-most popular decentralized exchange by weekly active users and allows users to swap tokens within the Axie Infinity ecosystem.

Ronin

DIMO

Celestia

Immutable positions itself as the first layer-two scaling solution for NFTs on Ethereum. According to Immutable, its blockchain does away with Ethereum’s limitations like low scalability, a poor user experience, illiquidity, and a slow developer experience. Instead, users benefit from instant trading and massive scalability while enjoying zero gas fees for minting and trading NFTs without compromising user or asset security.

Thanks to this technology, users will be able to create and distribute assets like ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens on a massive scale. Chris Clay, the game Director of Gods Unchained, a project already building on Immutable, stated that Immutable allows Gods Unchained to implement a new meta-system that was previously impossible. In this fashion, Immutable aims to create a world-class experience for users and developers alike.

Immutable

Radix is a layer 1 smart contract platform built to create a Web3 future for everyone, not just the innovators here today. A future where our friends, family and colleagues can confidently participate.
After 10 years of research, testing and development, Radix has built a highly optimized stack of custom technologies that tightly integrates wallet, programming language, execution environment, and consensus algorithm.
Users, with the Radix Wallet, can confidently use Web3 and DeFi with human-readable transactions, transaction guarantees, native assets, and more.
Developers, with Radix's Scrypto programming language, can build secure, production-ready dApps in a fraction of the time.

Radix

Axelar claims to deliver “secure cross-chain communication for Web3.” The project provides a decentralized network and tools to help builders of decentralized applications (dApps) with seamless cross-chain communication through its protocol suite, tools and APIs.

Axelar features three core components – a decentralized network, a software development kit of protocols and APIs, and a set of gateway smart contracts for cross-chain connectivity.

Powered by a decentralized network of validators, anyone can join the network, build on it, or use it. Apps builders can interact with a simple API atop a permissionless network that routes messages and ensures network security via proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.

AXL is the native token of the Axelar network. The protocol also supports the cross-chain transfer of several native tokens via their wrapped ERC-20 versions, including AVAX (Avalanche), ETH (Ethereum), FTM (Fantom), GLMR (Moonbeam), and MATIC (Polygon).

Meanwhile, Axelar has raised capital from top-tier investors, including Binance, Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, Polychain Capital and others.