I don’t quite understand how Marinade and Jito work. I currently have a stake solflaire at cogent and stakehaus. If I stake in Marinade and Jito and do not use the msol or jitosol tokens for anything, do I have a greater risk of losing the staked solana? Or do I only have a greater risk if I use msol and jitosol in other defi protocols?
There’s some non-zero amount of risk that they could depeg but that risk is low. Super easy to swap back to sol at any time too
Staking: You stake directly to a validator. There is no smart contract risk, as there are no smart contracts involved. The validator can’t access your tokens, as they never leave your wallet (they just get your “voting power”). The only risk at the moment is the validator increasing their commission to 100%, taking your staking rewards. You can’t use your SOL until you unstake.
Liquid staking: You give your SOL to a third party, such as Marinade, and they stake it for you in a number of validators of their choice. In exchange you get mSOL, which is pegged to the value of SOL, and increases in value every time they receive staking rewards. The risk is higher, since there’s a smart contract involved that could potentially be exploited. You can use your mSOL in DEFI to get further rewards or sell it without having to wait for unstaking.
Marinade also has “Native staking”, which stakes your SOL to a bunch of validators directly (so no mSOL involved). It would be equivalent to staking manually, with the added bonus of receiving some MNDE (Marinade’s governance token).
So in reality you can just hold msol instead of holding sol + native stake.
Yes but marinade own your coins during this time, if they get hacked , coins go bye bye. That said marinade are battle tested OGs in solana. You never know though .
How to stake “native stake” with marinade? Can I do it with my solanas in solflare?
Yeah, just go to Marinade’s app, connect your wallet and click stake SOL. Then select Native before staking. https://i.imgur.com/J2Bjeae.png
Native stake i can see the balance in Ledger? Or I need always to connect to marinade website to see the staked sol?
Smart contract risk, and another layer of smart contract risk if you use the LST in DeFi. However, I’d say Jito and Marinade are trustworthy pools, I use them myself, together with SolBlaze!
I’d say that the risk could be considered ‘contract risk’ - if the contract is exploited then you could lose your funds. The probability of this is unknown.
The risk is bigger than stake on validators like cogent and stakehaus?
Jito uses a fork of Solana Lab’s so you’d assume the risk isn’t as high (relatively speaking) as they are regularly audited.
Personally I’m using Jito for the next couple months and then re-evaluating since they are offering 3x point rewards for swapping to them with rumors of a potential airdrop (unconfirmed).
You risk it having it de-pegged, which, ya never know
Answer not entirely correct above. Liquid staking is where you are exposed to smart contracts. Native staking like staking with validators is fine. And Marinade Native is fine as well. You retain custody of your funds.
The absolut safest approach is to stake directly to a validator, such as Cogent. You could perhaps try both. Good luck and stay risk averse!
