# Marinade Liquid Staking Revenue Methodology

## 1. Overview

Revenue measures the portion of fees that a project retains, as determined by its take rate. For Marinade Liquid Staking, this metric represents the earnings generated from commission on staking rewards, fees collected from instant unstake operations, and distributed bond settlement payments. Revenue is calculated as the value retained by the protocol treasury after rewards are distributed to supply-side participants but before the deduction of operating expenses.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: `LiquidUnstake`, `UpdateActive`, and `UpdateDeactivated` instructions from `Finance` programs, and `ClaimSettlement` and `ClaimSettlementV2` instructions from `Bond` programs on Solana
- **External data**: End-of-day price feeds and asset metadata

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Staking rewards commission tracking

- **Purpose**: To capture the protocol's share of staking rewards generated by the Marinade Liquid Staking staking pool.
- **Logic**: `UpdateActive` and `UpdateDeactivated` instructions are parsed from `Finance` programs to identify the associated treasury accounts. SPL token mint instructions for mSOL directed to these treasury accounts are identified and aggregated. This represents the commission taken by the protocol on the staking yield earned by the pool.
- **Key fields**: `transaction_id` (identification), `amount` (minted quantity), `to_address` (treasury account)

### Component B: Instant withdrawal fee tracking

- **Purpose**: To capture fees generated when users exit staking positions immediately via the liquidity pool rather than through the standard delayed unstaking process.
- **Logic**: `LiquidUnstake` instructions are parsed from `Finance` programs. SPL token transfers directed to the protocol's treasury account within the same transaction are tracked and summed. These transfers represent the fee paid by the user for immediate liquidity.
- **Key fields**: `transaction_id` (identification), `amount` (transfer quantity), `to_address` (treasury account)

### Component C: Bond settlement revenue allocation

- **Purpose**: To attribute revenues from validator bond settlements to the Marinade Liquid Staking product.
- **Logic**: `ClaimSettlement` and `ClaimSettlementV2` instructions are parsed from `Bond` programs to aggregate total settlement payments. These payments are then distributed to Marinade Liquid Staking based on its proportional share of total protocol TVL. Product TVL is determined by tracking the balances of Marinade Native SOL in stake accounts associated with specific authority values, as well as balances in the reserve and liquidity pool accounts.
- **Key fields**: `in_claim` (settlement amount), `stake_account` (account identification), `post_balance` (account balance)

### Component D: USD conversion and aggregation

- **Purpose**: To normalize all revenue components into a single USD-denominated metric.
- **Logic**: Asset amounts are normalized by decimal precision and multiplied by end-of-day price feeds. Values from rewards commission, instant withdrawal fees, and allocated bond settlements are summed by day. Daily totals are aggregated using UTC day boundaries.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` (timing), `price_usd` (valuation)

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

fees * take_rate (illustrative — revenue is observed directly per project, not derived from take_rate)

Fee revenue retained after supply-side payouts. Before cost of revenue (e.g. L2 DA fees) and before operating expenses.

Revenue

Liquid staking

Stakers deposit funds into Marinade and receive a return on investment in the form of staking rewards (supply-side fees).

Marinade is a non-custodial staking protocol built on Solana. Marinade was co-founded by Lucio Tato and launched in 2021.

MNDE tokenholders own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of the total staking rewards earned by the protocol (revenue).