Marinade charges no deposit fee on any product. The only costs you may pay are when you exit a position, and one performance fee on the USDC Vault. Everything is below.
What It Costs You, by Product
Product | Deposit | Exit cost | Ongoing fee |
Marinade Native | None | Instant Unstake: typically 0.10% to 0.40%, set by the market. On the Marinade route, includes a 0.01% protocol fee and a listing rent of about 0.00097 SOL, charged on each unstake | None |
None | Instant Unstake: typically 0.10% to 0.40%, set by the market. On the Marinade route, includes a 0.01% protocol fee and a listing rent of about 0.00097 SOL, charged on each unstake | None | |
Marinade Liquid (mSOL) | None | Instant Unstake: no Marinade fee on the swap route; the Marinade liquidity pool route charges 0.03% to 1.5%. The app uses whichever returns more SOL | None |
USDC Earn Vault | None | Withdrawals are free. How much you can withdraw at once depends on available lending liquidity. | 5% of the interest you earn |
Marinade Recipes are not a separate row: they are a reward-token choice on a Marinade Native position, so the Marinade Native costs above apply whichever reward token a Native position is paid in.
How the mSOL fee is charged: it is deducted from the unstaked amount before the ticket is credited, and the Receive amount shown in the app already reflects it. Delayed Unstake of mSOL has a minimum of 1.0043 SOL; below that, use Instant Unstake instead.
How to Pay Less
On a short hold, Instant Unstake can cost more than you earned. A staked position earns roughly one 340th of its annual rate each epoch, which at a 5% APY is about 0.015% per epoch. An Instant Unstake at 0.10% to 0.40% therefore costs somewhere between 7 and 27 epochs of rewards, roughly one to four weeks. Which costs less depends on size: the delayed fee is flat and the instant cost is mostly a percentage, so delayed wins on larger positions, while below roughly 1 to 3 SOL, depending on the price, instant can be the cheaper of the two.
Use Delayed Unstake instead of instant. On Marinade Native and Select it costs a flat 0.003 SOL, including a Native position paid in a Recipe reward token. Instant Unstake costs more because a buyer pays you SOL immediately for stake that would otherwise take an epoch to unlock.
On mSOL, check both before you assume Delayed is cheaper. Delayed Unstake of mSOL is a flat 0.2%. Instant Unstake has no Marinade fee on the swap route, only the DEX spread; the Marinade liquidity pool route charges 0.03% to 1.5%. The app uses whichever returns more SOL, and with deep DEX liquidity that is often more than Delayed returns. Compare the two Receive amounts in the app.
The 0.2% applies only to mSOL. If you stake with Marinade Native, including a Native position paid in a Recipe reward token, there is no cost to enter, and Delayed Unstake costs a flat 0.003 SOL taken from your wallet SOL balance. Existing Marinade Select positions pay the same flat 0.003 SOL.
Check the amount before confirming. The app shows the SOL you will receive from an Instant Unstake before you approve.
Worked Examples
100 SOL in Marinade Native, Instant Unstake at 0.25%: roughly 0.25 SOL, so you receive about 99.75 SOL plus rewards.
100 SOL in Marinade Native, Delayed Unstake: you receive 100 SOL plus your rewards, and pay a flat 0.003 SOL from your wallet SOL balance.
100 SOL worth of mSOL, Delayed Unstake at 0.2%: roughly 0.2 SOL, so you receive about 99.8 SOL worth.
1,000 USDC in the vault earning 50 USDC of interest: the 5% performance fee is 2.50 USDC, taken from the interest only, never from your deposit. It is already reflected in the APY shown.
1 SOL in Marinade Native for six days, Instant Unstake at 0.25%: the fee is about 0.0025 SOL against roughly 0.0008 SOL of rewards, so you receive slightly less than you staked. On small positions held for a short time, the Instant Unstake fee outweighs the rewards.
1 SOL in Marinade Native for six days, Delayed Unstake: you receive your 1 SOL plus about 0.0008 SOL of rewards, and pay the same flat 0.003 SOL from your wallet SOL balance. The fee is flat, so on a position this small it outweighs the rewards.
Costs That Are Not Marinade's
Solana network fees. Standard per-transaction fees paid to the network. For Marinade Native, Marinade covers the rebalancing fees each epoch.
Market price. On a native Instant Unstake, the price is set by the market. On the Marinade route, apart from the 0.01% protocol fee, the difference from your stake's value goes to the buyer, not Marinade. On other routes and on the mSOL swap route, any spread or price impact is a market cost. All of it is included in the amount you see.
Third-party fees. DEX, wallet, or exchange fees when routing through other venues.
Q: Is the 0.03 SOL I should keep in my wallet a fee?
A: No. We recommend keeping 0.03 SOL available as a buffer for fees, but nothing takes it. If you do not have enough SOL to claim, the Claim button is greyed out and tells you so. The actual Solana network fee is well under 0.001 SOL and the rest stays in your wallet.
How Marinade Makes Money
Marinade does not take a cut of your staking rewards. There is no performance fee on Marinade Native, including a Native position paid in a Recipe reward token, nor on Marinade Select or Marinade Liquid.
Revenue comes from the validator side of the protocol rather than from stakers. Validators compete for stake allocation through the Stake Auction Marketplace, and Select validators contribute through their bond agreement. None of it is deducted from the rewards that reach your position.
Marinade aims to deliver stakers the Solana Staking Index (SSI), the market-wide benchmark for what SOL staking should return.
The USDC Earn Vault is the one exception, with a 5% performance fee on interest earned, as shown in the table above.
Revenue and Transparency
Protocol revenue is allocated by the Marinade DAO through approved governance proposals. Under MIP-22, 10% of protocol revenue goes to programmatic open-market MNDE buybacks, with the rest supporting protocol liquidity, ecosystem development, and operations.
Marinade DAO on Realms:
v2.realms.today/dao/899YG3yk4F66ZgbNWLHriZHTXSKk9e1kvsKEquW7L6Mo