Your staked SOL does not live on Marinade. It lives on Solana, in stake accounts that belong to your own wallet. Marinade is the app you use to manage them, not the place they are kept.
If the Marinade app or website goes offline, can I still get my SOL back?
Yes. With Marinade Native, you remain the only authority that can withdraw your SOL, at all times. Marinade's only power over your stake accounts is to delegate them to validators. It cannot move your SOL, spend it, or block you from withdrawing it.
Your stake accounts stay on Solana whether or not Marinade is reachable. Any Solana tool that can manage stake accounts can deactivate and withdraw them, including the Solana command line tools and wallets that support native staking.
Is the answer different for mSOL?
Yes, and it is worth understanding the difference.
Marinade Native: your SOL sits in stake accounts you own. Nothing is pooled, and no smart contract is involved.
Marinade Liquid: you hold mSOL, a token issued by the Marinade stake pool program. The stake pool owns the underlying staked SOL, and your mSOL is your claim on it.
If the Marinade website is unavailable, mSOL is unaffected. It is a standard Solana token, so you can swap it for SOL on any DEX that lists it, or interact with the stake pool program directly using the Solana command line tools to unstake. Neither route needs our frontend.
The dependency worth understanding is the stake pool program itself, since it is what holds the staked SOL. That program is deployed on Solana, has been audited, and can only be changed by a community multisig, not by the Marinade team alone. This is the tradeoff of liquid staking: you gain a tradable token, and in exchange your position depends on a smart contract rather than only on a stake account you own.
If you would rather not have that dependency, Marinade Native is the option without it.
What would actually change for me if Marinade stopped operating?
Your stake would stop being actively managed. Marinade's rebalancing moves your stake toward better performing validators each epoch, and that would stop. Your SOL would remain staked to whichever validators it was delegated to, and would keep earning whatever those validators earn.
You would not lose your stake, and you would not lose the ability to unstake it.
Do I need to keep a record of anything?
Your wallet's seed phrase is what proves ownership of your stake accounts, the same as for any other asset in your wallet. Keep it safe and offline. There is no separate Marinade account, password, or recovery file to store.
How do I check this for myself right now?
Look up your wallet address on a Solana explorer such as Solscan or Solana Explorer. Your stake accounts will be listed there, on-chain, independent of Marinade. That is the proof that your SOL is where we say it is.
For more on audits, governance, and risk, see Marinade Security.