Using marketing budget to acquire and promote ecosystem assets and partners

General
#1

Hi everyone, btuck here on the core Marinade team. I’d like to run an idea by the DAO to get their feedback (no formal proposal at this time. Just a brainstorm):

Marinade is very much a community project on Solana, bootstrapped from the beginning. Recently, our operations are back in the green again (see treasury report from December), and community activity is also picking up again after a pretty quiet 2023.

Something that has always bothered me is that Marinade is a community project but its wallets do not reflect this. Assets are almost entirely mSOL-MNDE and USDC. The Token Exchange Program was launched in 2022 right around the time of the Luna collapse and besides investment in USDC from some validators/projects only Solend participated (SLND token).

Typically the way partnerships go these days is partners ask for MNDE to fund cross promotions or liquidity mining, or they get MNDE via Open Doors or Marinade Earn.

I think we could go a step further by using a minor portion of the marketing budget to acquire ecosystem assets from good partners and projects and even use them in promotions, show them off in our wallet and even share any airdrops or staking rewards with the community.

Examples like:

Famous Foxes stake treasury with Marinade, Marinade buys a FFF, stakes it, raffles off FOXY in community for their raffles.

NFT marketplace adds Marinade staking, Marinade buys their NFT or token.

X project launches a validator, Marinade acquires their tokens or NFTs out of support.

CyberFrogz use mSOL for their trading portfolio, Marinade gets a Cyberfrog and promotes it as a use case for LSTs.

Projects that stake and promote Marinade Native, Marinade gets their NFTs.

Or GECKO tokens, SMBs, or SAMO/BONK, Mad Lads, Cogent Cogs, Flare, Lotus, Divine Dogs, etc. you name it.

It’d be especially great to support projects with validators, or projects who stake with Marinade.

Additionally, given all the airdrops we could take some of this yield-farming or airdrops and raffle them to MNDE holders as well.

We can expect some of these assets to decline in price. But some of these assets are yield-bearing in some way, and Marinade could even take these airdrops or points (Bananas, BERN, Foxy, etc.) and raffle them to the Marinade community.

We’d also want to apply safety considerations to these assets and make sure minting or staking them or using them in DeFi would not subject other Marinade assets to any additional risk.

The idea is to not only support Solana community projects but also strengthen our community and social presence, while also supporting our partnership efforts.

Appreciate your feedback as we flesh out this campaign. Thanks!

8 Likes
#2

Nice idea. I think the simplest way would be to buy NFTs of projects that stake with Marinade, mSOL or Native. The benefit to both parties, both in financial and marketing terms, is quite straightforward, and other projects that see this will be incentivized to do the same (stake with Marinade).

5 Likes
#3

I think it’s a good idea. One thing I would slightly warn is that keeping on top of updates with other assets (e.g. oh i have to stake this here or claim airdrop be X date) is a non trivial amount of operational work, especially if there is to be oversight on each action. So I would recommend any plan include how you want to deal with that, i.e. there should probably be a treasurer/treasury committee which should a decent amount of flexibility in managing the assets up to some $ value.

6 Likes
#4

Have to agree with nope here, the management of assets is problematic

I think its a good idea, and instead of purchasing the assets, id suggest we further decentralize and allocated MNDE tokens to the ecosystem projects that support us

It accomplishes the same thing (giving an incentive to stake with Marinade), but it doesnt increase our work, AND it helps get more involvement in our governance

TLDR I think its a great idea, just dont think we should be purchasing assets that increases work, we should be giving MNDE token to accomplish this network effect

5 Likes
#5

good call for sure on the mgmt. not sure how active we’d be farming/staking stuff especially if there was any connection to the main wallets. I have to assume though Marinade will get some Kamino airdrop (LPing mSOL-MNDE), JUP etc. that should be claimed this year.

3 Likes
#6

noted. there is also plenty of work in ad hoc deals though, as well as politics to play, and even the Open Doors Program has had reporting issues given the liquid/composable nature of MSOL.

Maybe DAO members and core contributors should just be holding and repping the NFTs themselves though and not the protocol wallet.

2 Likes
#7

yeah we had a lot of NFT projects stake with us in 2022 and it would have been nice to support them more than we did (usually just some AMAs and twitter stuff) especially since we also had an NFT at the time and tried breaking into that crowd.

3 Likes
#8

It sounds like a good idea. I would definitely vote for this proposal.

4 Likes