Taking this one separately, since it is its own beast.
I am interested in $MNDE numba going up, for obvious reasons, but I think the data so far shows this description is extreme.
- MNDE price has been in decline with the market, while Marinade’s staked SOL has remained stable or increased;
- A lower MNDE price makes liquidity incentives less valuable, but OTOH, it makes it cheaper and more attractive for validators or teams running a validator to acquire and direct stake their way using the gauges - in theory, those teams would have an incentive to promote Marinade as a staking mechanism.
Finally, mSOL distribution among DeFi protocols doesn’t seem to linearly relate with the MNDE incentives. There is currently 7.2M circulating mSOL, however looking at the top places where incentives are going:
- Solend will be receiving 47% of our incentives, but only has 23% of that mSOL (1.7M);
- Orca’s mSOL/whETH was receiving 11% of the MNDE incentives, but seems to only have a smattering of mSOL;
- Orca’s mSOL/SOL pool has almost 2x the liquidity as the whETH pool, even though it gets only 1/4 of the MNDE and has less than 1/2 the APY.
(Intentionally skipping Marinade’s mSOL-SOL pool, since you actually deposit SOL on that one, and Lifinity’s since they control it directly.)
This is only a cursory inspection, but it actually bears asking ourselves if the incentives are in any way driving TVL or where mSOL is deposited. In other words, we could even turn this question around: are those emissions actually buying us something?