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Hold Strong #22 👑 (take 2) @MarinadeFinance & @SagaDAO
Recorded: June 9, 2025 Duration: 1:01:18Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, key players from Marinade Finance and Saga DAO shared insights on their latest partnerships, growth strategies, and innovative token features, highlighting the importance of community engagement and the evolving landscape of DeFi.
Full Transcription
Music so I'm so sorry about that fam.
I'm over here complaining about Marinade Finance and Saga DAO's internet when I should be yelling at Super Team Balkan and the setup here for rugging me from the downstairs area.
So we have to go upstairs really quick and get a new Wi-Fi connection, but we should be good to go and the data is a fallback on that.
I don't know what happened, to be honest.
Like X app just completely crashed.
I was listening to Saga DAO
and then all of a sudden we lost them.
So, but we're back again.
Don't worry, if you put your TG in the other chat,
I'm still going to be checking that,
but also share this one.
This is the new space.
Take two, Marinade Finance and Saga DAO.
So sorry about that, guys.
But yeah, we're on the road actually, because again, we're at Super Team Balkan Startup Village out here in Croatia.
So just getting things set up for day one.
We posted some video content earlier.
We have a nice little booth.
There's a whole bunch of areas like there's a working space, like a co-working working space.
We got coffee.
They gave us lunch and everything.
So all in all,
it's been an awesome experience so far on day one.
And we're going to have a bunch of students here
coming to visit us tomorrow.
So this Fox will be super busy with questions
and onboarding and helping out
the next generation of Solana users
that'll hopefully be tuning into
the following week's Hold Strong
that hopefully won't rug like this one did.
But waiting on the
guests to come back but in the meantime uh quick soul flare updates is uh the entire team a majority
of the team is going to be out here uh for the middle to end of super team balkan startup village
because right after this we're going to be heading to hungary for the apex uh Apex Budapest.
Really excited about that.
So, appreciate
you clouds coming back up. Sorry about
I don't know what happened fam.
All of a sudden the X just shut off
and I'm over here yelling about your Wi-Fi
and I should be yelling at the Super Team
Balkans instead.
We'll let you guys come back up and
we'll finish up the origin story and I'll also send Nikki Scans an'll let you guys come back up and uh we'll finish up the origin story and uh also
send nikki scans an invite and you guys i need you now more than ever because the first the first
space rug so i need you guys to like and repost and share this dude blow the comments up and uh
you know for the efforts i'm going to make a little bit more work for myself i'll add another
three guardians uh to tg today so it'll be a total of 13 today
for our little fox up right there but yeah we should be good to go on our new internet connection
and i appreciate you guys bearing with us today but let's get back to it we were learning about
the origin and intro stories for both saga doubt and marinate i'm gonna kick it back over to d
i'm so sorry fam but yeah you were doing an amazing job and uh'm going to kick it back over to D. I'm so sorry, fam. But yeah, you were doing an
amazing job. And you had to kick back up where we left off. Oh, you're good. Actually, I was
talking and then I was sort of picking up what you were doing. And I passed it off to Nikki Skance.
Oh, hey, Nikki. I don't know. So I don't know. TLDR for anybody who was, I guess, got rugged a little bit before there, basically, you know, went from a KOL run DAO to now a professionally run DAO, biggest DAO in Solana.
We have a very unique offering where every single one of our users are actually real.
We're the most civil resistant project and community on Solana.
Rapidly already the biggest.
And we're going to be growing from an order of magnitude.
Like 10x very soon when it comes to our community count.
So very hyped.
Very excited.
And really excited to be here.
But I don't want to talk too much.
I think I already spoke it.
But let me pass it to Nicky because he was in his middle of his whole origin story
with Marinade.
And I don't want to rug him.
So go ahead.
Well, thank you for co-hosting for me in the meantime.
I didn't even know the space was still going on
while I rugged.
But we'll kick it back over to Nicky
who is also in his origin story apparently.
Nicky, go ahead, fam.
Tell us about Marinade Finance.
This is actually great because I felt like I was doing a bad job the first time. So this is a
great opportunity to redo. I appreciate the reset, if anything. All right, we're going to slow it
down this time. Marinade founded 2021, one of the most OG projects in the space, obviously TVL was crazy and great early on,
as it was the only staking solution that allowed you to stake with multiple validators.
Additionally, early on, it was the first LST.
Now, obviously, liquid staking tokens are everywhere.
But Marinade was the first team to realize that one of the issues with staking in Solana was that two and a half day wait and people wanting to have that instant liquidity.
So it was the first LST to come up that way.
And yeah, and now you're kind of continuing on that same trajectory.
Now it's four plus years later.
or four plus years later.
It's all about staking to multiple validators,
getting the absolute highest APY,
avoiding smart contract risk where possible,
and then also getting instant access to your liquidity.
Now with native and with liquid.
So now we have both options there.
But a lot of you all probably used Marinade early,
like the most normal like Marinade origin story
I'll hear from like OG Solana users is it's
one of the first teams that they ever staked with. Also, at some point, if you've ever wanted to sell
Solana, but where did it go? If you wanted to sell Solana, but were staked, a lot of people
would swap to Emsol again years ago from their original staking account
and swap out that way for liquidity.
So that's like the classic OG Solana users
interaction with Marinade.
OG Emsol, I was there for that fam.
We're gonna be talking all about staking
and all about the new updates and announcements
that you just recently made.
But before we do, we gotta kick it back over to SagaDAO.
Like I said, this little back and forth session.
So SagaDAO, your entire collection, like you said, was an airdrop.
These awesome pixelated monkeys.
So let's dive into the collection really quick.
If you could share any alpha on some traits and then what it's like joining the community
once you pick up one of the NFTs.
Oh, I mean monkeys?
Oh, no, you're talking, you're thinking about Saga Monks.
Oh, yeah, my bad.
I'm sorry, yeah, it's like a different, like a different kind of DAO.
Completely different.
It's not a DAO.
Saga Monks is not a DAO.
Saga Monks is an NFT collection created by KRTV.
collection created by KRTV. That is a different thing. It was actually innovated and incubated
That is a different thing.
inside of the Saga DAO in the beginning. They are now in their own Discord, but the Saga DAO,
actually, we don't do NFTs traditionally. The way to get membership in the saga DAO is by having the saga or
seeker token which is the soulbound token so if you guys remember the saga
DAO dropped 20,000 phones in the first collection the saga phone and each
phone had a soulbound token so one-to-one you can't move the soulbound token. So it's one-to-one. You can't move the soulbound token. It's in that
wallet. It's in that phone. So it's a very special type of unique offering because you know that
every single person who has this token is a real person, right? With an address, an identity,
of course, a lot of user. And now that the secret phone is coming out from Solana Mobile,
they sent out these free-order tokens for placeholders,
also still soulbound, until they get their phone, which ships off to support.
So now, since that, we've increased our membership by a very large amount.
I presume we're going to increase by another 10x when it comes to membership counts,
targeting maybe 100, you know, targeting
maybe 100,000 users, real users.
And the whole unique thing, really, about the Saga, one of the unique things is that
we are civil resistant.
We are the gold standard in civil resistance, because since our whole DAO is one device,
one vote, you can't game the system. There are, you can, there are countless DAOs in the space where usually a whale can buy up the tokens and one token, one vote doesn work because at a maximum, no person really has
more, like, you know, at max, like
even if they were trying to
game the system, five votes. So
the fact that we have tens of thousands of users
and about to be 100,000 users,
the most gold standard
when it comes to civil resistance. They're all real
people. And in that magic
of Solana core users, we
have a lot of things going like one of our special
uh powers as you say is that they have the community has a really good sense on what
actually is going on at solana and like and so any type of app or um service or product has uh
we're tapped in in a way where we can always ask the community what they think about it.
And it always comes back as a pretty one-to-one match on what the larger
market wants,
because we are like the most core Salon users.
you know,
for the DAO,
all you need is a phone to join either a Saga or a Seeker,
and you can come participate with us us we have some of the biggest
activations in the space we are mobile native we get the apps first we get the biggest collaborations
in the space um all we love to see from the community is engagement we just like to see
them participate in our poker nights and community builds.
We have funds for people to develop apps.
We have an incubator.
We have development going on for a claim site that is actually working like gangbusters.
But I'm not going to keep – I'm not just going to keep – I'll get more into those details later, but to your question,
that's really how you get membership here is from having an actual device.
And we're sort of like this web two, web three bridge on mobile.
Okay.
Bullish.
And so, yeah, sorry about the confusion.
I've just always known clouds as a monkey and I got confused there, but I also have the soul bound token for the chapter two.
And as a quick reminder, make sure that if you order during the on-chain season you're filling out for the shipping address uh because
that was also required but we're going to come back to you guys in one second to learn a bit more
but let's kick it back over to nikki nikki i got like a two-part question first is if you could
break it down kind of you know for a lot of like our new users, just really quick between liquid and, you know, like traditional staking. And then also, if you can kind of segue into the into
the marinade select a little bit about that new feature, appreciate it, fam.
Yeah, let's see if I can pull this off without. Yeah, without without talking for 30 minutes
about stuff no one cares about. Okay, I got this.
So a traditional native staking that you guys know and love is just, you know, you're basically giving your voting rights and just delegating natively to Solana validators and then getting rewarded for, you know, delegating your votes to those validators. That you all understand.
The reason that there's a two and a half day lock is because
that's how the voting works, right? That's every Solana epoch. Now, it was identified that obviously
as you start to get into bigger and bigger amounts of money, which obviously things like
institutions do, that two and a half days can actually be pretty awful, right? If there's a
move that you want to make and you need access to your money, having to wait two and a half days can actually be pretty awful, right? If there's a move that you want to make and
you need access to your money, having to wait two and a half days can be tough. Now, the solution to
it was liquid staking tokens, which you guys all know, you guys hear all about all the time. And
there's Jitosol, there's Sanctum, there's obviously Emsol, which is our version of it.
All that does is it utilizes a smart contract to basically give you this new
token, being whether it's Gido Sol, you know, Sync that has a bunch, Emsol, like I said,
the value of that token accumulates over time versus normal native staking payouts.
So all the money that's coming in from Solana inflation, instead of going as payouts into your pocket as normal, the value of the liquid staking token accrues, which means you can just sell that token at any point and your value is already added into that.
native? Well, technically, there is a small amount of smart contract risk in liquid staking,
meaning that there's another piece of tech that has to be happening to me.
This is why many people with very large bags of soul will prefer native, right? Native is easy. It's simple.
It's what Solana runs on, right? Now, as native has become bigger for marinade, we have found out
that institutions actually prefer native, which is why, you know, we, you know,
soul flare has instant unstake.
We've brought instant unstake to our users as well, meaning that these large
institutions can instantly unstake their soul from native.
And that's just done with liquidity pools.
It's not actually super complex, but it's a way better.
It's a way better user experience.
Marinade select, which is perfectly meant to solve this problem for, you know, large
Solana holders and institutions is bunches, which is right now it's 30 validators that
are fully KYC, right?
Meaning we know who they are, where their servers are, making sure that everything is
SOC 2 compliant and all the Solana delegated to select is then
split up amongst this 30 validator segment. Meaning that you are, you know, you're helping
decentralize the blockchain, you know, by not just staking all to one validator. It's super secure
because they're all, you know, they're all KYC'd and you know there's no potential legal trouble
that any of them could ever get into.
And then also, Marinade Select is only working with teams that are fully optimized, meaning
that they have professional teams, professional-grade hardware, professional servers, making sure
that uptime is an absolute top priority.
These are not just... And there's nothing wrong with people
running their own servers and running their own nodes
like just as individuals, but like there's a big difference
between someone running a node out of their garage
as a side project and a team of 40 people running
a very high end professional node.
Those nodes make the chain faster.
That's just the reality.
They're able to process transactions faster.
So yeah, that's why there was the need for select.
I appreciate that.
And that's like a new system I'm learning about also,
but I really do appreciate you going over
like the liquid and native staking
because a lot of users, you know,
are still learning about, you know,
staking and earning yield.
So great job, Nikki, you absolutely crushed it. We're gonna come back to you in a second because there's a lot more that are still learning about staking and earning yields. So great job, Nikki. You absolutely crushed it.
We're going to come back to you in a second because there's a lot more that we could talk
about, but want to kick it back over to SagaDAO because I want to talk about some of these
IRL events. We saw you guys at Accelerate and we saw on the timeline that you have this
new New York City Saga house coming soon, which, first of all, it looks a lot nicer
than Souljakey's content house.
This looks really nice.
I don't know if that was an AI image or that's the real house,
but let's talk about some of these IRL events
and what opportunities there are for DAO members at these events.
If you don't mind, Diony, I'd like to take this.
Please.
Yeah, so Saga DAO House is something that we've actually wanted to do initially for Breakpoint.
We have a lot of plans for that, but we thought, hey, let's test it out and see how it goes with New York for NFT NYC and Solana Solstice.
TNYC and Solana Solstice. So yeah, recently over the past like six-ish months, we've thought that
taking ourselves and bringing ourselves into more of an IRL presence is very beneficial for the DAO.
So recently we've been, yeah, created a good presence at Accelerate, partnered with Ledger over there.
And that was super sick for us and a big deal for us as well.
So yeah, now we're really trying to push further with IRL presence.
And Fogged Out House seems to be where we're standing on that.
That's amazing.
And so how can people sign up for this if they wanted to take
part in like an interview or podcast or be part of like the event yeah so if anyone wants to
participate or have any presence of their project or even your personal brand feel free to dm me
cloudking tv and we can arrange uh an interview or something like that also there are still rooms
available uh for reserve if anyone needs a place to stay and wants to hang out with a whole bunch
of crypto bros in the house feel free to dm me as well so yeah big opportunity for listeners and if
you're going to be in the new york city area for solana
solstice nft nyc all that good stuff yeah big opportunity uh we're going to hop over to you
guys back more because i definitely have some more questions and if you guys have questions
hit the comments as well if you're trying to join the guardians drop your tg handle
and 13 users are going to be added at the end of the space so we can welcome them into the new
guardians community but nikki speaking of our guardians uh one question that came in they users are going to be added at the end of the space so we can welcome them into the new guardians
community but nikki speaking of our guardians uh one question that came in they wanted you to
expand on the auction marketplace a little bit and how that works because they were uh checking
out the website and uh they were a little bit confused on that can you expand on the marketplace
a little bit yeah absolutely who is who is they in this scenario i don't like to dox foxes you know
what i mean because there's yeah i don't want any dumb questions just bad answers you know
yeah yeah i hear you um no it's a that's a great question the auction the auction marketplace is
super confusing honestly it's so confusing that we we don't like we don't really show it to people
like we keep the act like you can visit the site and see the auctions that are taking
place, but it's so not user-friendly that we're just like, just know that the rewards
are high.
Just know that there's no chance of downtime because we, you know, we take bonds to make
sure that if there is downtime, you get paid out on that.
It's not super user-friendly.
So I think we have like a pretty educated, you know, spaces crowd here.
So happy to dive in a little bit deep into that and get a little nerdy with you all. So
the stake auction marketplace or SAM, like we call it, introduces competition to staking,
which as you guys know, tends to, you know, get you the best deal, right? It's like if you are selling your house, right?
You use a realtor and tries to get you lots of offers on that house.
So that's what we're doing with your soul.
So we have about 11 million sold TVL.
We're taking all that users sold and we're saying, okay,
it's up for auction.
Who can bid the most, right?
Who can get all of these users the highest APY?
So validators are literally coming in and they're saying, okay, this is how much MEV
I can offer.
This is how much commission I can offer.
This is how much APY I can offer.
This is how much extra soul I can bid on top of it.
And then all of those numbers combine to then equal that final APY bid.
It's Dutch auction style.
So basically anywhere between,
it's like 90 to 150 validators will win
in any given epoch, right?
And let's say the winning bid will be like 10% APY,
something like that, sometimes a little bit higher, right?
Then anyone who's above that threshold
then starts to get delegated pieces of that 11 million SOL.
And just a quick clarification point,
MSOL is run on the same system.
There's just an additional layer of smart contract there,
but the yield from MSOL is also coming from SAM.
SAM is the secret sauce that powers like our APY,
our rewards, and marinate at this point versus select, which is a different set of validators.
Quix, maybe you have a follow-up potentially on that explanation to like help clarify
any points. I know it can be a little convoluted. No, you actually did a good job, and I'll be
honest with you. That question came from me.
I'm only saying that because you said it was a good
question, but it's to encourage
other people to ask questions as well,
because there are no dumb questions, only
bad answers. So I appreciate you, Nikki.
We'll come back in a second, because there's definitely
a lot more we could talk about with Marinade,
but I want to kick it back over to Saga,
because, dude, obviously people love rewards in the ecosystem.
And you guys have been able to claim rewards.
And I think there are still rewards that were previously able to be claimed.
But you also have like a couple of tools as well as far as like launching a claim, a token.
So can you dive into this a little bit for the rewards aspect?
a little bit for the rewards aspect absolutely thanks for asking that uh so as a saga down we
Absolutely. Thanks for asking that.
obviously we go and like hunt down different um opportunities for claims and airdrops from like
the biggest like uh organizations and projects but we sort of wanted to put it on its head um
we have this magic where where we can sort of guarantee that we have real users. So in that, back when I joined,
I saw Sogadale had this issue
where mostly people would get their claims
and then they would immediately sell the token, right?
This is like a problem within Solana in general
and crypto in general is people do claims and airdrops
and it's like a mark, it's like to get the name out
there to get the project name out there but then what happens is that everyone sells it the price
of the token goes down and then you have this marketer who just sent two hundred thousand
dollars a million dollars in airdrops and all they got was their chart going down. So I always thought that was pretty broken,
and it didn't make sense from a marketing guy.
I've done marketing for 15 years now,
and the content got a lot of awards for it,
so I really understood how broken that was.
And so what we did, maybe started a few months back,
building this, and it's out now, right?
We're just fully getting out of beta now,
which is pretty exciting.
We already had a lot of good results.
But basically, I gamified airdropping and claiming.
We built this claim site where projects can come,
drop their tokens for the Sagadaw community to collect,
but there's a catch.
So working with the Entropy team, small but very dedicated community,
very strong community, they have this really amazing little thing
called Second Law.
And what that really is is if you get this token and you sell it right away,
then you don't get as much token next time. I love that. So I
took that idea and made a claim site. So for the biggest community on Solana, I was like, well,
here's this claim site. We're going to make a leaderboard. And whoever, we're going to start
dropping claims to people, it's free money. Here, have it. Have fun. Free tokens.
But there's a catch.
If you sell it right away, we're watching the wallet behavior.
So if you sell immediately, you're not going to get as much next time.
And it's fun because now we see a leaderboard.
You can go to sagamobiledout.com.
You can see the leaderboard for yourself.
There are some jitters. I feel bad for them. But on the top of the list, there's Diamond
Hands and Hodler and Hodlers. Those people will get more next time. And for a marketer,
say you're listening in and you're a project and you want to drop some tokens. The fun part is
we're actually just releasing, it should be today, releasing a new part of this claim site where you can just
reward the top 500, the top 1,000, the top 5,000 people, right? And here's the magic.
So we did it for our own token, the Sagadad token, and the hold account went up by 3x. It
was 1,000 holders. It went to 3,000 holders in two days. Our market cap went up 5X in two days.
And it was holding for a very strong amount of time.
It's still higher than, much higher than it was when, before we released it.
So, and all we gave people was actually just 50 cents.
I gave people 50 cents.
I was like, hold it.
Don't sell it.
And that 50 cents ended up being $2.
Now, that was a test.
So when we keep scaling and getting bigger,
like I presume, you know, when you get 10, 20, 50, $100, $200, $500 airdrops,
the magic will be that the token price will actually go up.
The DEXs are picking up the hold accounts.
They get excited. You see outside liquidity coming in, pumping up the decks is start picking up these the hold accounts they get excited you see outside
liquidity coming in pumping up the price even more it's actually pretty amazing we've already
had a few other projects uh try it um like plink their token went up 2x already uh in like a couple
days so um that's the whole thing so claim site means that token go up, not down.
I think it's pretty special.
It definitely is like rooted in the fact that like every single one of our users are real.
There's no multiple wallets here.
This is a real user.
So for a marketer, you're talking to real people, giving airdrops to real people, and you can
actually see how they behave.
It's pretty special.
So we're excited.
I think we should be getting out of beta, I think by end of week, but it's clearly open
to the public.
Any project that wants to have their token perform and have real users and real wallets,
come DM me.
I can get full analytics support for you, and we can take it from there. token perform and have real users and real wallets, come DM me.
I can get full analytic support for you and we can take it from there.
We hardly take anything when it comes to fees.
We just try to keep the lights on.
But at this point, we are becoming like a really big marketing arm in SOGDAT where we want to be able to connect, engage in participating contribution members in Solano with the best projects and really make like a sustainable ecosystem.
I heard like the foundation of that was holding strong gets rewarded.
But as a quick little follow up, all you'll have to do to be eligible to take part in this is own uh one of the soul
bound tokens and you can connect your site for the claims but do you also have to have the soul
bound token if you wanted to uh create a claim or that's open for anyone that's open for anyone
uh the people who can claim are saga and seekers um with the soul bound token, but for dropping tokens, it is for everyone.
This is a Solana ecosystem contribution.
We want to be able to grow the space where tokens go up, not down.
So, yeah, long story short, it's for everybody.
We're trying to be inclusive.
We want people to work together with us and grow the pie.
See, that's really bullish because not only do you have the,
like the whole aspect of holding behind it, getting rewarded for more drops,
but you're also targeting people that are genuinely invested in the ecosystem. Like
they paid hundreds of dollars for the Saga or the Seeker phones. So, you know, they care about the
ecosystem. So that's a great audience to market to. I appreciate you so much, Saga. We're going
to come back to you for a few more questions in a little bit, but let's kick it back over
to Nikki because you did a great job expanding on the marketplace, but something else I wanted
to touch on was the automatic delegation. If you could touch on this a little bit and does
this affect any of like the instant unstaking or does this require for waiting for the epoch?
Delegate, okay.
I get what you're getting at.
It's close.
The instant unstake, no,
is not affected by the automated delegation.
That is, the instant on stake is,
like I said, it's a pretty, it's a simple tool.
Essentially, you are giving us control
of your stake account and we're paying you for it.
Like, it really is that simple.
It might feel more complex, but it's like,
hey, like you take control of my, you know,
my stake, like my stake account, right? With a hundred soul on it. And then we give you 100 soul for that.
It really is that simple. Now for the delegation, what actually the way it works, I believe we're
at about 5% turnover, something like that. So as every epoch comes in and new validators are coming in and out
of the winning set for whatever the current APY threshold is, we won't actually remove
all the soul at once from like the now losing validators and give them the now winning.
We'll only do it in 5% increments. The reason for
that is because there is time that it takes, right? It takes an epoch to unstake and then an epoch to
then restake, right? That downtime would mean that there's some amounts of soul that are currently not staked. So we'll only swap and redelegate 5% at a time.
And that's so as a user,
you're not feeling that swap time at all.
And keep in mind,
like anything that we're doing on our end
to optimize or to swap soul in and out,
you are seeing the correct APY always.
So like all of these factors
are being accounted for on our end.
So like if Marinade's APY comes down, you'll see it.
And the reason for that might be
is that a large set of validators, right,
have now come out of the threshold
and new ones come in and we're making that swap.
And that's maybe why it comes down. And then when you see it go up, it's because new validators
have come into the set now, like they're being redelegated to Sol and they're giving, you know,
they're able to offer and bid much higher APY. And then that's why you'll see like the APY go up.
But you're always seeing the true value on your end.
We're dealing with all the messy stuff, you know, on our end.
And it is, for the most part, decentralized, right?
Like SAM basically operates mostly on its own
with just little bits of help and pushes from our team.
I appreciate you popping the hood on that, Nicky,
because I know that helps out a lot of people
with their understanding and their risk tolerance in this.
We're going to kick it back.
And then you guys also have a calculator also.
Definitely check out the Marinade website.
And there's so much documentation.
It's been audited.
It's all right there for you guys to see.
We have So sock two compliance on
there now appreciate it we just did a whole it's funny we did a we did a rebrand and it's very
it's very marinated because again staking is boring in the best way um could you really
could you really quick just explain like what that means uh for some of our listeners What the sock, the sock, um, audit.
Hmm.
Yeah.
So sock two is like super, it's like, it's government.
It's super institutional. It basically means that we've had a very large, we worked with, um, EY on ours.
Uh, you have a very large governing body basically go through, it's like a year
long audit.
It just means that we know where all of our money is.
We know all of our contracts are checked properly.
We're banking totally legally and compliantly.
Essentially, it's a checkmark that says like we can work in most countries
and there's nothing we're touching that's even potentially problematic.
And it's a stamp of approval for very large institutions like, you know, Fidelity or Canary
Capital or BlackRock or whomever that, hey, you can work with us without having to do
your own due diligence
because we already have that SOC 2 compliance. It's not something that a regular salon of
D-Gen is going to care about. But for instance, Helios just finished theirs after we did ours.
I don't know this for a fact, but I'm sure Gito is probably going to be working on theirs as well.
It's going to become
the standard. So it was cool that we were the first ones to get it done and that others
also have been working on it as well because it just elevates the entire ecosystem. The more
SOC 2 compliant teams means the more large institutions with billions of dollars can invest
money in Solana safely, which means that all of your bags go up in that scenario, right?
Because if more money is coming in, they can invest safely.
It's good for everyone.
Yeah, 100%.
You're building the foundation for institutions to have the trust to come in here and know that everything is compliant.
It's all in the up and up.
So that is huge, especially for their legal teams.
So appreciate you, nikki so much for
talking on that and thank you for expanding for the foxes that didn't know i'm gonna kick it back
over to saga dow really quick because honestly i don't know if you guys were going to mention it
but i'm going to mention it for you you guys have a call to action item right now uh because you're
in the contention to launch the lst for island dow uh and i was out there last year with clouds
we had an amazing time in kosamoy uh but I also, number one, didn't know that this was also part of the tokens that you could
launch. And if you want to go ahead and share about that current campaign you're working
Cloud, you want to do that? I mean, I can talk about it. So, Islandal is good friends of
ours. Good guys. I think they just launched their another NFT collection recently.
But basically, we had this conversation
where they're going to launch an LST.
And there's a few, I think,
I think we're in contention with Soul Blaze now.
They might be running away with it a little bit.
But the idea is that
on their platform Soul Blaze,
you can do LSTs, but
you can do split rep.
So the idea for
someone who wants an LST, like
a project that wants an LST,
you don't have to run a validator
yourself in order to do this LST.
You can put your LST on someone else's
validator, and
that's how you
peg your token, basically. So it's one-to-one to
soul for people who don't understand what an lst is it's just a liquid staking token so it's uh
it's um one-to-one with solana but um branded with a different project who then gets yield
on you holding it through the validator now for soul, we, we talked to the Soulblaze people too.
Um, cool guys over there.
The idea was to have Island out stake on base or LST on our validator.
And then we split rep, right?
So they'll make money without having to, they'll collect fees.
They're not having to run a validator.
We run a validator, umator backed by the Solana Foundation.
We're on the Solana Foundation Delegation Program.
So very secure, very trusted validator.
And we also would collect fees.
And it would be a mutually beneficial and synergistic relationship
because we run, we maintain the validator.
They get to maintain the LST and, um, and market on the, on the end.
So right now I think we're in a competition with soul blaze, uh,
where I haven't checked the statistics lately, but I know it's just the,
um, you got to own the Island Dow token in order to vote.
So, um, you you know that's if for anyone who's been in this ecosystem you sort of know what token based voting sort of runs away with but uh you know
check out check out the uh competition i don't really know where we're at at this point um
i know so so blaze was winning winning but I'm not sure anymore
but again, I mean
at this point, to win
that game, you would probably just need
to buy a whole bunch of Island DAO token
and place your votes
100%
and some of our Guardians might have that
Island DAO token because we've worked with them
in the past and I think we might be part of the upcoming Island DAO this year.
Got to confirm on that.
But Clouds also threw his paw up.
Want to kick it over to him.
What's up, Clouds?
Yeah, so the vote is actually over.
It was completed yesterday.
And Soul Blaze took it by a long shot, unfortunately.
But props to them.
Very happy for that happening in the solana ecosystem
anyhow so let's go let's go as the bear of bad news that's why they call them clouds but no it's
just being realist but i appreciate you sorry for that but that doesn't mean that in the future
there won't be other opportunities and that is also really cool to know that you can launch an
lst through the saga DAO,
because that honestly is a lot more viable option for a lot of projects.
You know, running a validator is extremely expensive.
Launching a token sometimes is a death sentence.
So yeah, this is definitely a great option to have for projects.
Going to kick it back to you guys one more time in a moment,
but got to go back over to Marinade and Nikki.
Fam, so much has been going on and we've talked about a lot in spaces,
but something that we haven't had a chance to talk about,
but I want some alpha on is you got to tell me about what this master chef
is going on. Um, and I, dude,
I've seen Gordon Ramsey on the timeline, dude.
So I want to learn more about this.
There's like a marinade community being built up and how I can get in the
the marinade community being built up and how I can get in the kitchen.
kitchen.
Well, first, I'd love to have Wombat answer this,
but I think he's being perma-stuck as a listener.
Is Marinated Account showing up as a listener for you guys as well?
He might be a speaker right now.
I think he might be here.
Can we get a check on that?
Hello, hello.
Can you all hear me? Oh, I can't look at that yeah on my sheet on
my screen it's showing you the marinade account as a listener spaces never never
ceases to amaze me it's a little scuffed but no I'm happy to talk about it um I
won't say too much because again we're in the alpha stages we want we don't
want to reveal too much we want to keep I was just about to say way too much,
so I'm glad I passed this one off.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, so we're going to be revealing more soon,
just to preface,
but essentially we're taking some inspiration
from the Soul Flare Guardians.
I think that you guys have a very strong community.
So we're going to be pretty much essentially
curating our own community of master chefs.
Be active.
That's all I'll say.
The benefits, as Gordon Ramsay said in the video today, will be revealed soon.
So there's a lot coming. We're excited to reveal that and just stay active, repost, interact, and maybe you'll
get added to the prospect list.
I'm like Santa.
I'm like out here writing lists of who's naughty, who's nice. And yeah, just you want to be on that list. That's all I'll say.
So it sounds like the main alpha is to support. Support, show it on the timeline,
engage with marinade, and you may get that master chef invite to the kitchen.
And expect to be yelled at just like Gordon Ramsay when you get there.
Absolutely. You'll get called an idiot sandwich every day.
That's what we expect.
No, but in all seriousness, it's about the biggest supporters,
and we want to find a way to reward them,
give them a closer access to the team,
and just get feedback as well.
That's a big factor.
Dude, thank you so much for shouting out the Guardians community.
I've definitely been a huge part in helping to build this and curate it, man.
But it's an honor to be mentioned like that because we truly believe that we built such a strong community.
It shows down there.
You see all the comments, all of our Guardians out there showing up every day, putting on on the timeline.
So bullish on the MasterChef soon to be.
And who knows, maybe some Guardians will be in there also.
We got time for one more question for each project and then we'll have some closing statements and remember if you guys want to be in the guardians drop your tg in the comments and why you would make a great addition
to the community and i'm going to be picking 13 three extras because we're missing the rest of
the team and the first space rug so uh you get a little bonus of three extra guardians this week
but let's kick it back over to SagaDAO.
I know you mentioned the NFT NYC coming up with the SagaDAO house and you're just going to be a presence in New York.
But you guys always seem to have a presence all over the ecosystem.
Can you share any insight into what else you got planned for this year? And then also as far as like being part of the Saga DAO community, are there opportunities for people that maybe didn't get the seeker or the
Saga phone to contribute to the community and possibly play a role in
developing Saga DAO?
Sorry, that was like a two part question.
No, you're good.
Upcoming things and opportunities, but you know,
we're running out of time and I want to squeeze as much in there.
Oh yeah.
Yeah, we have 10 minutes.
Yeah, let me do the TLDR, but we are going to NFT NYC.
Obviously, I talked about that.
We're also going to Abu Dhabi for Breakpoint, and we're going to take the NFT NYC as a pilot, as you say.
We're going to do some content there.
We're going to sort of build it out.
We're going to go balls to the wall.
Huge house.
Looks gorgeous.
Team's going to be strong there.
We're going to have some big collaborations.
And throughout the year, as these things pop up, we're going to try our best to be at all
the events that are really important to Solana.
And, you know, we're a cash positive company.
So we're going to try our best to activate and get people involved.
And to your...
Oh, please, Clyde, go for it.
Oh, sorry.
You can continue if you want.
Okay.
So, yeah, big RL presence.
I think that's really important.
That's one of our, like, really big mandates.
I feel like the magic when it comes to crypto and digital is that we have to bridge between Web 3 and Web 2.
Like, at the end of the day, we really even – I don't want to call it Web 3.
I just want to call it real life.
So we definitely are on the forefront of that and being able to bridge the gap between real-world use cases and Web3.
And to your second question, opportunities.
We're definitely always building.
We have so many different projects that want to get involved, want to get attention from our community, want to get their apps tested in our community.
They want to drive traffic from our community to their community.
And all those opportunities are definitely on the table.
Our deal flow log is very long.
We're talking to the biggest projects in the table. Our deal flow log is very long. We're talking to the biggest
projects in the space. But at the end of the day, we like to work with really smart, innovative
teams and also large projects. So any projects that are really pushing the boundaries and
really need people, that's, I think, the most important part. Like I was saying over at Accelerate,
I feel like community, at the end of the day, I think AI is going to take over a lot of people's
roles as we move forward into the future. But I know community is the most important.
If you don't, if people don't know that your thing exists, it doesn't exist. So us as the largest community on Solana,
we have that ability of supercharging any project
to give max visibility, put it on the map,
get real revenue generating, get real test use generating.
And for any project leads out there know
that if you have users, you can take that metric and go to any VC or angel and
say, hey, look, I make money and I also have real users and they love this app because XYZ.
So I think any project that really wants to get invested with not just the core community of
Solana, but also the largest, I feel they should just reach out to me and Cloud, say hi.
We have deals up.
We have so many deals going on.
So, you know, it's an open door.
But if you really want to get a taste of the community,
I would say get a phone.
So then you can really, it's how it's gated.
Or we also have a SDAQ NFT that gives you,
it's called the Saga.AlphaClub NFT
that's on Magic Eden right now, Minting.
That also gives you a taste of our community.
It's open to anybody.
Resourcing one of our great alpha callers, Gapper,
amazing caller, 300 to 1000% returns on his
calls. So
you can do a little research there, but we're very
just want to contribute.
So any team
that really just wants to connect
with community,
give us a call. And I see
Cloud's hand up, so I'm not sure if he wants
to close with something. Yeah, so there's one thing so I'm not sure if he wants to close with something.
Yeah, so there's one thing.
I'm not sure if I'll get in trouble for talking about this,
but I'm going to say, anyhow,
a really big deal for us and our future
is we're not always going to be under the Solana mobile umbrella.
So what we're thinking of doing eventually
is expanding into more of a device DAO
rather than just Solana Mobile.
So yeah, look out for that.
That's Alpha right there.
Yeah, no, he's 100% correct.
We don't just want to be tied to the Solana Mobile phone.
We believe that they're a great product.
At the same time, we're a community-driven DAO,
and that's why we're the biggest.
And I feel like there's a whole bunch
of opportunities out in the space with D-Pen,
with IRL devices.
Like you got your Play Solana, you got your Shaga,
you got your Ledger,
you got a whole bunch of devices out there. I mean, everyone even knows the Jambo phone. You got a whole bunch of devices out there.
I mean, everyone even knows the Jambo phone.
You got a whole bunch of devices out there, and I feel like we have a tried and true model of making community around real-world devices with soul-bound function.
So, yeah, that is the Alpha cloud just dropped. We do want to expand in that direction and excited. We're already sort of in talks, or at least talks with different device holders.
Obviously, you saw the collaboration with Ledger.
So, yeah, exciting.
That's exciting.
I'm glad you said that, Cloud.
Appreciate it.
That's major news.
Let's go, dude.
And thank you so much for sharing that on the Hold Strong Space, because that is an incredible peek into the future of Saga DAO and what you're going to be coming.
And also, I'm kind of like reading between the lines a little bit and let me know if I overstep.
But it sounds like there might be, you know, some business development opportunities or growth opportunities.
If you're bringing projects, you know, to Saga DAO and they're launching or they have LSTs and partnering with them.
Who knows if you're providing enough value, you might be brought onto the team.
So that might be a little something
I could infer from that.
I don't know if that would be fair to say or not.
Yeah.
No, yeah.
You see me doing 100 emojis.
Let's go.
I know.
I was hoping, yeah,
your finger wasn't slipping on that
and you were trying to throw the thumbs down.
But I appreciate you guys.
We'll kick it back over to you in one moment
for a quick closing statement. But over it to Nikki, man.
Same kind of for you.
I want to know about, we learned about the MasterChef, which was huge alpha, but I want to learn about where we're going to see marinade on the world tour.
Are you guys planning to go to any more Solana events this year, or are you guys just going to go be meeting with all these large institutions, pumping our bags and bringing them all to Solana?
meeting with all these large institutions, pumping our bags and bringing them all to Solana.
Yeah, it's going to be, as usual, institutional focused on some events. And then obviously,
a lot of the slot events as well. The big things coming up that are pretty institutional based,
I'd say permissionless in, you know, in Brooklyn, we'll be at that um again good institutional presence uh and then also
das which is uh digital assets summit uh which is hosted by blockworks we were just on the one
in new york city uh we'll also be in the one uh in we'll also be in the one in london uh that is
like i was initially bearish on some of these institutional events. And I was definitely wrong.
The like level of players that are there is massive.
And while they might not be as fun as something like Solana Accelerate,
like the conversations that are,
that are being had and like the,
the overall bullishness of like these multi-billion dollar and sometimes
near trillion dollar companies on like our ecosystem is pretty humbling.
So excited to be at some of those.
And then of course, you know,
we'll see you all at Breakpoint as well.
Oh yeah, for sure.
Soul Flare is going to see you and SagaDow there.
So excited.
And I'm so excited to welcome 13 new guardians
into our community.
I've went ahead and chosen them.
I'm going to add you guys, man,
because normally I have NEPA here helping me out,
which is also why you're not getting the news either this week.
Enjoy these two amazing projects, AMA, and make sure that you're sharing this space
because it was recorded so people can listen back in case they couldn't find us
from the first one that got rugged.
But I want to give each project an opportunity to make a quick closing statement.
I tried my best to ask as many questions and get as much insight into the
projects,
but if there's anything that you didn't get a chance to talk about or any
message to web three and the world,
the floor is yours.
I'm going to kick it over to the saga team first,
and then we'll finish up with Nikki and get you guys out of here for the
week.
Thanks Quirks.
I appreciate it.
I appreciate everything hosting us and all you do for the community.
Super pumped that I met you at Accelerate.
You're just as genuine in real life as you are on the mic.
And basically, I just want to say in Web3, you know, it's definitely Wild West a little bit, but we're maturing as an industry. And I would say, for me personally,
I've worked with very large teams,
run million-dollar productions and projects and companies,
and I would say that the SocketDow core team
is one of the best teams I've ever worked with in my life.
So when it comes to Web3 players and professionalism, I'm profoundly impressed by the talent that I have on this team.
And, you know, check me out on LinkedIn so you can sort of see my reference of what I'm talking about.
But to that, we got so many things cooking.
Quix, you did a great job sort of priming me to sort of reveal a lot of this stuff.
But, you know, TLDR, we are one of the biggest – we are the biggest community in the space.
And we have an open door when it comes to bright and intelligent and talented and large projects.
And open door to access some of the biggest
community on Solana.
We have the token tool that I'm really excited about that I think fixed a
very large ecosystem problem.
We have our validator.
We have our token.
We have our LST.
We have the Socket.AvaClub NFT minting now.
We are not just preparing for now,Club NFT, Minting Now. We are not
just preparing for now, but for
the future years to come.
We have, again,
a cash-positive business, which is
hard to say. I would say that's rare
in this space.
We're here for the long haul.
As a DAO,
a unique offering where it's
one device, one vote.
It's like a true democracy.
One of the most unique, the gold standard, if you will, when it comes to representation in a community.
And we are really just built to scale and really built to bring real-world use case to Solana and bringing community together.
Because again,
community I feel like will be the premium in the future moving forward in the
very close future.
So for anybody who wants to get involved,
my DM is open.
Cloud's DM is open.
Just come talk.
And we're glad to build a relationship with you guys.
And probably we're probably one of the least extractive projects in the
space.
Usually we just ask a lot of projects to stay to our validator as default,
which means that don't make money and that we make money.
So it's not even like it's again,
it's where we're extraction is not really part of our vocabulary.
We like to have projects win alongside of us. Again, extraction is not really part of our vocabulary.
We like to have projects win alongside of us.
So with that, I appreciate you, Quicks, and giving us the floor.
What's love?
I appreciate you guys so much. And it goes right back to you.
After meeting you guys and the entire team, you guys are also just genuine builders that care about the ecosystem.
are also just genuine builders that care about the ecosystem and after our space today learning
about your plans for the future and expansion and where you see you guys down the road just gets me
so bullish so i could not be more bullish on the entire team and you get a tax credit for having
clouds on board uh so i appreciate that also but clouds you also get a final statement closing one
do you have any message for web 3 in the world or something that we didn't cover today hey appreciate everybody
thank you for having us up here quick appreciate you and just shout out to marinade and nikki
over there thank you for giving us the rundown on everything and uh yeah community's everything
that's all i want to say and we got one here so let's fucking go i'll see uh island out quick
oh yeah for sure and i might see you somewhere IslandDao. Quick. Oh, yeah, for sure.
And I might see you somewhere else on the Solana World Tour before then.
But definitely, we have unfinished business in Koh Samui.
Thank you so much, Cloud, SagaDao, D.
Make sure you guys are following these accounts all up on stage right now.
Support them.
And you already learned the ways that you can get involved.
But kicking it over to Nikki, I never hate seeing you in spaces, fam.
We could be talking about anything from Solana to manga.
It is just always a vibe with you.
And you are just as the same IRL as you are.
And I didn't even know you were a golfer.
I learned that on the timeline just yesterday.
But Nikki, I appreciate you so much.
You had a closing statement also.
Is there anything we didn't get a chance to cover today for Marinade?
Or do you have a message for Web3 in the world?
Or both?
All right. We're going to go quick because we are over time. All right. First,
Quix is the best, goes without saying. Don't need to talk about the five minutes. Everyone
knows and agrees with that. Second thing, on Sagadaw. So he talked about, they both talked
about how they run their own validator. Now, it is so important that you
go and support your small validators. People outside this ecosystem have no way to know that
these validators exist. Like when it comes to your institutions or large players that aren't
living in the trenches like we are, if you guys don't support small validators, then nobody will. And then we're going to end up with just the most centralized garbage ever,
which is all stake is on the same three validators.
And that is no good for everyone.
So if you, if you love something like saga, for instance,
um, saga it out, for instance, like go stake on the validator.
That is good for the chain. It's very healthy for the chain.
Next thing, Marinade continues to copy Soul Flare, not only on the Guardians, but also on having a weekly spaces.
Consider it flattery. We are hosting our spaces now every Wednesday at 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
Our guests continue to be baller.
Again, trying to copy Soul Flare with amazing guests. We have Cube Exchange on Wednesday, and then we also have the Zeus team on Wednesday.
Speaking of the Zeus team, that leads into my final point. Marinade is going to continue
to experiment and build lots of new products. We are trying to make staking more fun, more exciting,
experiment with things that bring us out of our comfort zone.
That includes two things.
One being finding new distribution methods for marinade,
getting marinade in front of more and more users, people, institutions,
taking shots on distribution channels, even if some of them don't work.
The other thing we're going to be experimenting with is redefining what staking soul means.
Maybe staking soul can support your business. Maybe staking soul helps you DCA into other
products or investments for you. But we're going to be playing around with that
quite a bit more. And again, turning Solana staking into a financial tool for everyone.
And yeah, more to come on that. I love that so much. Solana is for everyone, man. And make sure
you guys are special. I follow on Marinade Nikki. And don't just follow, man. Engage because Nikki is an OG in the ecosystem, man.
Ask anyone around.
They know that ape.
I appreciate you so much.
It's always good connecting with you.
And I'm happy I was part of Pilot One episode on Wednesday.
So make sure you're tuning into that cook on Wednesdays with Marinade.
Also an amazing space.
I'll be there this week to support for sure.
But guys, this has been hold strong episode number
22 we are going to invite 13 guardians that i picked in the comments right after this space
i'll send them i'll manually add news so expect that year we added soon if you're hearing a whole
bunch of croatian behind me it's because i'm being kicked out uh first fox in last fox out literally
they're kicking me out of the building now um but i just wanted to also on a personal note thank everyone for all your support for all the travel and safety and i appreciate it
man is this fox is all around the world spreading the word of soul flare and solana and thank you
guys for being here episode number 22 no matter where you are in the world it meant the world to
us because you could have been anywhere in the world but you were live or listening back to this
audio metaverse make sure you share because it is recorded for all of our listeners around the world much love guys we'll see you in the telegram
welcome our new guardians and here's a six second delay because elon musk man he he's busy he's
fighting with trump he's building robots he gave us a new encrypted chat that no one's using yet
don't add me to any group messages there but he's still working on this six second delay maybe we'll
have it next week maybe not only one Tune in next week and find out.
That one's for Nikki.
I appreciate you guys.
Much love.
We'll see you next time and on Wednesday with Marinade.
