How can validators point people to their favorite stakepool with out directing stake away from themselves?

General
#1

I am a huge fan of marinade and what it enables. I often come across a conflict that I would love to resolve some day. How do I both shill my own validator and market it when I also believe in the goals and mission of marinade? Even with my own funds I have the same dilemma, stake with my validator or particiapte in defi. As a huge Defi fan I’d rather be able to put all my funds in marinade and direct that stake towards my own validator while marinade gets to keep its fees and comission.

This is an off the cuff idea I quite literally was mulling over in the shower.

I wish there was a way that I could point my stakers to stake with me through marinade. I’ve thought about it enough such that I don’t know if you could implement it in a way that one could could avoid folks gaming the system but I really do wish the people who want to support both my validator and marinade could somehow do both. Right now one has to choose between defi + staking or staking with their fav validator.

I think it would have to be done through an NFT system where the NFTs were usable in defi but the actual non fungibility makes it not usable with a HUGE portion of defi especially LPs. I wonder if the Defi NFT world will ever develop enough where the above could be practical.

#2

Thank you Ben for posting this here. I appreciate that you let this go out even that you said it is not thought through.

My initial thoughts are, that it is a great for everyone: users, validators and Marinade. But what needs to be resolved is that if such idea is implemented, there needs to be a safety check, that will take care of important stuff: nakamoto coefficient, SOL distribution over multiple validators, efficiency of validators and of course apy for the user.

But if think this might be doable and helpful :slight_smile:

#3

IF the vaildator gauges proposal gets implemented, this becomes rather easy:

  1. simply talking to your stakers to move their stake to mSOL, farm MNDE and vote for you could work, or talking to any stakers to vote for you
  2. bribes: anyone can implement a bribe system to motivate people voting a certain way. Since votes are on chain, retroactive bribes for stake could work
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#4

Things could get really interesting when bribe systems start to emerge… especially as SOL’s inflation rate gets lower and lower over time

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#5

This is something I’ve wondered about many times too. Stake pools are great for the network and as validators we are all passionate about staking so in a great position to evangelise for Marinade. But we also want to make sure our own businesses are sustainable too.

One idea I had was that Marinade already has the ability to deposit stake accounts, and has a referral program.
Admittedly both options would require some work on Marinade’s side, but if we could either:

  • Encourage users to stake with us, then deposit their stake accounts to Marinade (not ideal due to delays in activating stake), or
  • Use the existing referral program to track what stake was referred by which validator

then Marinade could track which stake we referred, and keep that in a ‘reserved’ pot, seperate from the stake bot’s calculations of what to add and remove.
This way we would still get the benefits of our own delegator’s stake, but help Marinade’s goals of building TVL

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