Marinade Solana: What the Stake Auction Pays, Measured at Epoch 1064 (2026)

Marinade Solana is the oldest liquid staking protocol on Solana, and on 22 October 2026 its stake auction was clearing at 5.45% APR while the network's baseline paid 5.21% gross. We know because we asked the chain and Marinade's own public APIs instead of reading the staking page: four JSON-RPC calls to a Solana mainnet node during epoch 1064, Marinade's live TLV and mSOL price endpoints, the Stake Auction Marketplace scoring feed, and eight live Jupiter quotes that price the exit at every size. Every figure below comes from that snapshot, and the last section gives you the commands.

That matters because the first page of Google for this keyword is the official app, a Reddit thread, a YouTube video titled "Solana's Biggest Liquid Staking", and two review pages that quote an APY without saying where it came from. Not one of them checks the four things that decide what you actually keep: what the auction pays, who it pays it to, what the exit costs at your size, and how long the wait really is. One of those pages is also wrong about which protocol is biggest — by a factor of 4.6.

At epoch 1064, Marinade's auction was delivering a 5.45% APR floor to stakers, its mSOL token was worth 1.413459 SOL, and the whole protocol held 7,342,402 SOL ($768.1M). Here is the snapshot.

Measurement	Value on 22 Oct 2026	Source
Epoch	1064, slot 460,079,483	getEpochInfo
mSOL true price	1.413459285 SOL	api.marinade.finance
mSOL supply	1,596,547 mSOL, backed by 2,256,655 SOL	getTokenSupply
Total protocol TVL	7,342,402 SOL ($768.1M)	/tlv
Auction yield floor to stakers	5.4488% APR (5.63% APY compounded)	SAM scoring, derived
Network baseline, gross	5.2073% APR before commission	getInflationRate, derived
Realized mSOL growth	4.88% over 30 days, 5.93% over 365 days	/msol/apy
Validators receiving Marinade stake	66 of 670 scored	scoring.marinade.finance
Their stake-weighted commission	1.56%, against 26.64% network-wide	getVoteAccounts, derived
Epoch length, measured	25.98 hours (216.5 ms per slot)	getBlockTime
Instant exit cost, 1 to 20,000 mSOL	0.134% to 0.212%	Jupiter quotes
Instant exit cost, 30,000 mSOL	10.63%	Jupiter quotes

Two cross-checks say the arithmetic holds. Marinade's SAM scoring run reports a book of 5,851,418 SOL, and adding its two delegating products from the TLV endpoint — 3,594,504 SOL of Marinade Native plus the 2,256,655 SOL backing mSOL — gives 5,851,159, a 0.004% difference. Separately, dividing Marinade's reported staked USD by its staked SOL implies a SOL price of $104.61, against CoinGecko's $104.49 at the same moment.

Marinade Finance is a non-custodial staking protocol on Solana, and it is no longer only a liquid staking protocol. It now runs six products, and the one most articles describe as the core product is the smaller half of the business:

• Marinade Native (3,594,504 SOL). Your SOL stays in native stake accounts your own wallet owns. Marinade takes the stake authority — it can delegate, split and merge — and you keep the withdraw authority, so only you can ever move the SOL out. The docs are explicit that this is "non-custodial, not contract-free": delegation routes through Marinade's Native Staking Proxy program via PDAs.
• Marinade Liquid (2,256,655 SOL of backing). Deposit SOL, receive mSOL at the pool rate, keep the receipt token usable across Kamino Finance, Marginfi, Save (formerly Solend) and the DEXs.
• Marinade Select (1,310,341 SOL) — closed to new deposits. Marinade's own docs now carry a warning that Select "is not currently available to stake to." Existing positions keep earning and can still be unstaked. Its balance fell 21.4% in the 30 days to this snapshot, the fastest decline of any product.
• Marinade Recipes. Stake the Native way but take rewards in another token, delegated through one Marinade-run validator.
• USDC Earn Vault. A curated lending vault with instant withdrawals, and the only Marinade product that charges an ongoing fee — 5% of net interest.
• Marinade Borrow. Borrow against mSOL without unstaking it.

If you read an explainer that describes Marinade as "a curated validator basket called Marinade Select", it is describing a product that is shut to new money. Native and Liquid both delegate through the Stake Auction Marketplace instead, and that is the mechanism that sets your yield.

Marinade does not take a cut of your staking rewards — the on-chain stake pool's reward_fee is set to 0 — so its revenue comes from the other side of the trade: validators bid for the right to receive Marinade's stake. Every epoch, eligible validators are ranked by the total yield they will deliver, and stake flows top-down until it runs out.

The auction publishes its own books. The scoring feed quotes everything in pmpe, SOL per 1,000 SOL of delegated stake per epoch, and at 25.98-hour epochs there are 337.4 epochs in a year. Running the stake-weighted numbers across the 66 funded validators in epoch 1064:

Revenue component	pmpe	Annualized
Inflation rewards, net of commission	0.140866	4.753% APR
Validator bids won at auction	0.017795	0.600% APR
MEV share	0.003076	0.104% APR
Block rewards share	0.000567	0.019% APR
Total reaching stakers	0.162304	5.477% APR / 5.63% APY

The lowest-yielding validator still receiving stake sat at 0.161482 pmpe, or 5.4488% APR — that is the clearing price, and under a last-price auction it is what every winner has to deliver. Validators who bid higher are charged only enough to meet the floor, which is why you see bids as large as 1.01 pmpe on the books and an effective charge of 0.0144.

Set that against the network. Inflation was running at 3.5921% with 438,868,046 SOL staked out of 636,212,433 total supply — 68.98% — which puts the gross baseline at 5.2073% APR before anyone's commission. We derive that number the same way in our Solana staking APY breakdown. So the auction's 0.600% of bid revenue is roughly what offsets validator commission on Marinade's set, and the floor lands slightly above a raw, commission-free baseline.

One honest gap: the clearing rate is not what the last month paid. Marinade's own API reports mSOL growing 4.88% annualized over 30 days and 4.57% over 7 days, against 5.93% over the trailing year. The pool carries liquidity and rebalancing drag that a pmpe calculation does not, and Marinade's displayed APY is a 30-day moving average of a 14-day measurement, so it lags the auction by design. Quote the realized number when you are sizing, and the clearing number when you are comparing mechanisms.

You do not choose a validator on Marinade Native or Liquid, and the set is narrower than almost anyone writes. Of 670 validators scored in epoch 1064, exactly 66 received stake. The largest single allocation was 500,000 SOL, the median was 50,000 SOL, and the top five held 40.67% of Marinade's entire book.

The eligibility rules are published in the scoring config and they are strict: effective commission capped at 7%, at least 80% uptime over the trailing three epochs, a validator client at version 4.1.0 or newer, and a funded Protected Staking Rewards bond as a precondition for bidding at all.

The commission cap is the part worth dwelling on, because the network average is grim. Across all 668 active validators the unweighted median commission was 5%, but the stake-weighted figure was 26.64% — and the reason is that 65 validators charging 100% commission held 104,346,889 SOL, or 23.78% of all staked SOL. Those validators pass none of the inflation rewards to their delegators. Marinade's rules exclude every one of them, and across its 66 funded validators the stake-weighted inflation commission was 1.56%, with 32 of the 66 charging zero.

Two things the auction does not get you. Block rewards — the priority fees users pay to jump the queue, covered in our Solana MEV and Solana transaction fees breakdowns — are kept in full by 62 of the 66, which is why that line contributes 0.019% and not more. And MEV commission was zero at 38 of 66 but as high as 100% at others, so the 0.104% is an average over a very uneven set.

There is no deposit fee on any Marinade product and no performance fee on staking rewards. That is unusually clean and it is verifiable: the stake pool's on-chain reward_fee parameter is 0. Every cost sits on the way out.

Product	Delayed exit	Instant exit	Ongoing
Marinade Liquid (mSOL)	0.2% protocol fee	No Marinade fee on the swap route; its own liquidity pool route charges 0.03% to 1.5%	None
Marinade Native	0.003 SOL flat, from your wallet balance	Market-set, typically 0.10% to 0.40%	None
Marinade Select	0.003 SOL flat	Market-set, typically 0.10% to 0.40%	None (Marinade's 30 bps cut is charged to validators)
Marinade Recipes	0.003 SOL flat	Market-set, typically 0.10% to 0.40%	None
USDC Earn Vault	Withdrawals instant and free	n/a	5% of net interest

Three details in that table change decisions. The Native delayed-unstake fee is flat, not proportional — 0.003 SOL whether you exit 1 SOL or 10,000, which is 0.3% on a 1 SOL position and 0.000003% on a large one. The mSOL delayed fee is the opposite: 0.2% of whatever you unstake, with no size at which it gets cheaper. And Native instant unstake is not available in Fireblocks, MetaMask or Coinbase Wallet, which the docs state plainly and no review mentions; mSOL instant works everywhere.

Marinade's own revenue, under MIP-22, routes 10% of protocol income into programmatic open-market MNDE buybacks that are distributed quarterly to MNDE stakers who have voted in the previous twelve months. The accumulator wallet is published, so the buybacks are auditable. For scale: MNDE's market cap was $13.8M at this snapshot, against $768.1M of TVL.

This is the section the fee table cannot write for you, and it inverts the advice most Marinade explainers give. The conventional framing is that instant unstake is the expensive convenience option and delayed unstake is the cheap patient one. We priced the mSOL instant route with live Jupiter quotes against the true pool price of 1.413459 SOL, and for every retail size the instant route is cheaper than the 0.2% delayed fee:

Size	SOL received	Cost vs true price	Cheaper than 0.2% delayed?
1 mSOL	1.4115	0.134%	Yes
100 mSOL	141.14	0.146%	Yes
1,000 mSOL	1,411.21	0.159%	Yes
5,000 mSOL	7,053.38	0.197%	Just
7,000 mSOL	9,874.37	0.201%	Breakeven
20,000 mSOL	28,209.24	0.212%	No
22,000 mSOL	30,816.74	0.898%	No
25,000 mSOL	32,998.79	6.616%	No
30,000 mSOL	37,898.21	10.625%	No
50,000 mSOL	39,785.99	43.704%	No

Read the bottom of that table carefully. Between 20,000 and 30,000 mSOL the cost goes from 0.21% to 10.63%, and past 40,000 mSOL the route stops returning more SOL at all — a 50,000 mSOL quote and a 60,000 mSOL quote both came back near 39,790 SOL. The usable instant-exit depth for mSOL is roughly 22,000 mSOL, about $3.2M, or 1.38% of the 1,596,547 mSOL float, before slippage passes 1%. Marinade's own mSOL-SOL liquidity pool held 5,951 SOL ($622,510) at the same moment, which is 0.26% of the stake backing mSOL.

Three practical consequences. If you hold less than about 7,000 mSOL, instant unstake through Jupiter is both faster and cheaper than waiting an epoch to pay 0.2%. If you hold more than about 22,000 mSOL, delayed unstake is not an option you are choosing for patience, it is the only exit priced in single digits. And if a market-wide event makes everyone want SOL at once, that 22,000 mSOL of depth is what the queue is competing for — the same dynamic covered in our slippage in crypto explainer, only with your staking position on the line.

Solana stake deactivation completes at the next epoch boundary, and we measured epoch 1063 at 93,525 seconds — 25.98 hours, or 216.5 ms per slot. Not two days, not three. Marinade's own docs say "about 1 day" and the chain agrees.

That figure keeps falling as Solana's slot time drops; the 2026 reductions shipped through the Alpenglow upgrade cycle took measured slot times from roughly 415 ms to the low 200s, which shortens every unstake wait on the network. At the moment of this snapshot, epoch 1064 was 431,483 slots into its 432,000 — 517 slots, under two minutes, from the boundary.

Two timing rules are worth knowing before you start a delayed unstake:

• The last two hours of an epoch cost you a whole extra epoch. If you start an mSOL delayed unstake in that window, your claim lands at the start of epoch n+2 rather than n+1. Marinade's docs suggest waiting a few hours into an epoch and starting before the final two. Native positions have no start-time cut-off.
• You have to come back and claim. Delayed unstake issues a ticket; the SOL is not pushed to your wallet. Instant unstake settles in the same transaction.

The minimums differ too: mSOL delayed unstake needs at least 1.0043 SOL of value, while instant unstake has no mSOL minimum. Native instant unstake is the reverse — it needs a stake account of 1 SOL or more that has been active for at least two epochs.

Marinade is the oldest liquid staking protocol on Solana. It is not the largest, and the gap is not close. Both stake pools publish their size on chain, so this takes two RPC calls:

Dimension	Marinade (mSOL)	Jito (jitoSOL)	Sanctum (INF + LSTs)
SOL in the liquid pool	2,256,655	10,417,082	Router across many LSTs
Token price in SOL	1.413459	1.307504	Varies by LST
Tokens outstanding	1,596,547 mSOL	7,967,151 jitoSOL	n/a
Validator selection	Bid auction, 66 winners	StakeNet scoring	Per underlying LST
Protocol fee on rewards	0% (on-chain reward_fee is 0)	Stake pool epoch fee applies	Varies by LST
Distinctive feature	Validators bid yield to stakers	MEV tips folded into the token	Swaps between LSTs

jitoSOL's pool holds 4.62 times the SOL behind mSOL. Even counting all of Marinade's delegating products together — Native plus Liquid, 5,851,418 SOL — Jito's liquid pool alone is 1.78 times larger. Any page still calling Marinade "Solana's biggest liquid staking protocol" is quoting a fact that expired; it is the oldest and it is non-custodial, and those are different claims. For the LST-routing side of the market, our Sanctum on Solana review covers what the Infinity pool does differently.

The practical read: pick Marinade for the zero reward fee, the Native product's withdraw-authority guarantee, and the bid revenue. Pick Jito if you want MEV tips folded into the token and the deepest exit liquidity. Pick Sanctum if you hold several LSTs and swap between them. Wallet support is not a differentiator any more — Solflare and Phantom both expose one-click staking into all three.

Marinade has operated since 2021 without a public exploit and has an unusually long audit trail: Kudelski Security and Ackee Blockchain in 2021, Neodyme and Sec3 on the 2023 contract upgrade, Neodyme on the Validator Bonds program in 2024, and Neodyme again in May 2026 on the canonical-stake and deposit-fee changes, which it reports found no issues at any severity. The protocol also publishes a SOC 2 commitments document. That is more third-party review than most of Solana DeFi.

Three things the audit list does not cover, all checkable in a minute:

• The program is upgradeable, and it has been upgraded recently. The liquid staking program at MarBmsSgKXdrN1egZf5sqe1TMai9K1rChYNDJgjq7aD carries a live upgrade authority and its last deployment landed on 16 July 2026 at 14:33 UTC. Marinade's docs state the mSOL contract is controlled by a 13-party community multisig requiring six signers, which is a far better arrangement than a single key — but whoever holds those six signatures can change the code that holds the pool.
• There is no current verified build. The public verified-builds service reports is_verified: false for the deployed program, with a record last touched in January 2024 — well before the July 2026 upgrade. That does not mean the deployed bytecode differs from the open-source repository; it means nobody has published a reproducible build proving it matches.
• TVL is shrinking. Over the 30 days to this snapshot, total protocol TVL fell from 7,993,957 to 7,343,530 SOL, down 8.14%. Marinade Select led the decline at −21.4% (it is closed to new stake), Native fell 5.88%, and the SOL backing mSOL was the most stable at −1.28%.

Then the ordinary liquid-staking risks. mSOL trades on DEXs at a market price, which on the day of this snapshot sat 0.134% under its true pool price at small size and widened fast above 20,000 mSOL, as the table above shows. Solana validators can be penalized for downtime, though note the network has no automatic slashing implemented today. And using mSOL as collateral layers a lending protocol's liquidation risk on top of everything here — size it the way you would any leveraged position, using the framework in our position sizing guide.

Conflating these two is how traders end up disappointed by both. Marinade on Solana is an infrastructure yield product. At the floor measured here it pays 5.45% APR, which on a $10,000 position is about $545 over a year, with downside limited to SOL's price, protocol risk, and the exit costs priced above. It is the right home for SOL you were going to hold anyway.

Copy trading is an active spot strategy. Returns depend entirely on which wallets you mirror and when, and the distribution is wide in both directions — our is copy trading profitable analysis walks through what the on-chain record actually shows. A platform like uwuu.ai mirrors a chosen trader's spot DEX trades non-custodially with sub-400ms execution and charges a performance-based fee, so you pay only when you profit.

The split most Solana traders settle on: a core SOL allocation in Marinade Native or mSOL for baseline yield and collateral optionality, and a separate trading allocation kept liquid. What you should not do is stake the capital you need for entries — at 25.98 hours per epoch plus a claim step, a delayed unstake will miss anything that moves in a session. Start from the verified on-chain leaderboard and our how to copy trade on Solana walkthrough for the active side, and keep the two books separate. If you are choosing execution tooling at the same time, the best Solana trading bot comparison covers the field.

Every number here is reproducible without an API key. The network baseline comes from getInflationRate, getSupply and getVoteAccounts on api.mainnet-beta.solana.com — divide the inflation rate by the staked share of supply for the gross APR, and stake-weight the commission field across vote accounts for the 26.64% figure. Epoch length comes from two getBlockTime calls on consecutive epoch-boundary slots (epoch number × 432,000), divided by 432,000.

Marinade's side is three public endpoints: api.marinade.finance/tlv for the product-by-product balances, api.marinade.finance/metrics for the mSOL price and the 7-, 30- and 365-day APYs, and scoring.marinade.finance/api/v1/scores/sam for the auction. That last file carries every scoring run, so filter to the highest scoringRunId before computing anything — otherwise you will be averaging across epochs. The exit curve is a loop of Jupiter quote requests for the mSOL mint against wrapped SOL at increasing amounts, compared to the true price from /msol/price_sol.

Re-run them and you will get today's answer rather than ours. The clearing yield moves every epoch, the exit depth moves with DEX liquidity, and TVL has been moving down.

What is the current mSOL APY on Marinade?

Marinade's own API reported 4.88% annualized over the trailing 30 days and 5.93% over the trailing 365 days on 22 October 2026, while the stake auction was clearing at a 5.45% APR floor for that epoch. The displayed app figure is a 30-day moving average of a 14-day measurement, so it lags the auction.

How long does it take to unstake from Marinade?

One epoch, which measured 25.98 hours at this snapshot — not the two to three days often quoted. Starting an mSOL delayed unstake in the final two hours of an epoch pushes the claim out by a further epoch. Instant unstake settles in a single transaction.

Does Marinade charge fees to stake SOL?

No deposit fee and no performance fee on rewards — the stake pool's on-chain reward_fee is 0. Costs are on the exit: 0.2% for an mSOL delayed unstake, a flat 0.003 SOL for Marinade Native, and market-set pricing on instant exits. The USDC Earn Vault is the one product with an ongoing fee, at 5% of net interest.

Is Marinade the biggest liquid staking protocol on Solana?

No. It is the oldest. On 22 October 2026 jitoSOL's stake pool held 10,417,082 SOL against the 2,256,655 SOL backing mSOL, so Jito's liquid pool was 4.62 times larger. Counting Marinade Native as well, Jito's pool was still 1.78 times Marinade's whole delegating book.

Is Marinade staking safe?

It has run since 2021 without a public exploit and has been audited by Kudelski, Ackee, Sec3 and Neodyme, most recently in May 2026. The open risks are that the program remains upgradeable under a multisig and was last redeployed in July 2026, that no current verified build has been published for the deployed bytecode, and the usual depeg and validator risks. Size it like a DeFi deposit, not a savings account.

What is the difference between Marinade Native and mSOL?

With Marinade Native your SOL stays in stake accounts your own wallet owns and you keep the withdraw authority, so no Marinade contract can move it; you get no liquid token. With mSOL you deposit into the pool and receive a tradeable receipt token usable as DeFi collateral. Native held 3,594,504 SOL against mSOL's 2,256,655 at this snapshot, so Native is now the larger product.

How much mSOL can I instant-unstake without slippage?

Roughly 22,000 mSOL, about $3.2M or 1.38% of the float, before the cost passes 1%. Below about 7,000 mSOL the instant route was cheaper than the 0.2% delayed fee. Past 40,000 mSOL the route stopped returning more SOL at all.