Hi, let me try to answer some of the questions raised here
We at Marinade try to be open and transparent about all our financial numbers, however it is a long road to having a nice updated easy to read dashboard.
For the first time we have published a lot of numbers, links to treasury wallets etc. in this recent article Marinade Kitchen Stories: March monthly update | Marinade.finance Let me quote:
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As of April 1, 2022, Marinade holds in its treasury a bundle of mSOL, MNDE, and USDC accounting for $650,000 (at current prices)
For the month of March, Marinade monthly expenses were $118,691, or approximately 929 mSOL at current prices. $28,040 were also used in MNDE (unlocked by the executive team from the operational DAO treasury)
For the same month, management fees for the delegated SOL to Marinade and instant unstake fees brought in 690 mSOL, or $88,119 at current prices. Resulting in a net negative of 239 mSOL for the month of March, or approximately $30k at current prices.
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So reading these numbers we can come to conclusion that treasury currently holds about 5 months expenses buffer if no income, and also that the compensation amounts to about 45% of Marinades treasury. So yes, at this moment it is a lot while it should not lead to destabilization as we have more mechanisms (cutting expenses, selling MNDE) that we can use in case the token exchange is delayed.
Instant unstake fee is unpredictable and lately has not been much. On the other hand we rely also on the token exchange program which should quickly increase our treasury.
I also want to react on the proposal of “security fund”. So generally we aim to grow our treasury (currently via the token exchange) and also aim to have strategies on diversification where the majority of treasury would be placed in DeFi and in theory the return would be enough to cover operating expenses of the DAO. Minority would be used for various purposes, one of them would be storing a part of the treasury conservatively so that we are hedged against crypto/solana risks and also so that we are always looking on a buffer for at least 24 mths (ideally 36mths) of operating expenses that cannot be affected by “crypto winter”.
This treasury may allow us to buy back MNDE when we consider the price to be low and see ourselves enough solvent to do so. Having such treasury that we can rely on, also means being able to cover potential future need for compensations. But, these are impossible to predict. They always require a decision on what is fair and doable. I do not see the benefit to somehow change our treasury strategy for a special fund. We will try to grow the treasury anyway.