Global Fintech Interview with Brandon Tucker, Head Of Communications at Marinade Finance

Can you tell us a little about yourself Brandon and your professional experience so far?

Prior to joining Marinade I worked for a digital media startup that was acquired twice, ultimately by NBC-Universal, to grow their digital golf tee times business. My favorite part of the job (about 12 years at NBC) there as a managing editor of the editorial and the user reviews platform was the community element: a place for members to get unvarnished reviews and to build connections with one another. But I never really felt the incentives were aligned between the platform and the community,, which is what drew me to the Web-3 model of “Read-Write-Own.” Community members should feel a real ownership of the platforms they use and the DAO model, while in its infancy still, is a promising solution to this. 

Solana is attempting to do something that no other chain has done, we’d love to read about some of your biggest leadership hacks and learnings. Could you share your top few?

There are so many distractions in our industry. It is moving at a breakneck pace and new technologies and protocols are constantly being developed and narratives changing. And then DAOs have their own unique dynamic with token holders all having their own vision and being in the project for different reasons and time horizons. Focus is really critical. You have to trust the research and insights your team has done, ID those small handful of goals, and not veer from it because some new narrative is happening or some tweet went viral. 

With regards to leadership I’ve found that if you have a team member who seems particularly passionate about something and if it aligns with the company’s mission, support them with any tools or contacts and get out of the way and let them own it. 

Along those lines it’s important to let your team be themselves and communicate online in their own voice. Whether you are a developer or marketer. Authenticity is only growing in value (especially as AI rolls out). People are drawn to it and even if it’s not “polished’ or “on brand” there is value in the honesty and the feedback can help hone ideas. I’ve never censored or tried to craft anyone on my teams social media persona, just offer advice if asked. 

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How exactly does the automated staking token strategies work for your clients?

Our stakers stake their SOL with Marinade who then distributes this stake using a delegation strategy to a large pool of the top performing validators on Solana. This means your stake performance isn’t tied to one validator, who could go offline or change their commission without warning. It’s especially valuable in tumultuous markets and events like widespread server outages that can impact validators. Marinade’s algorithm is always evaluating performance to ensure only the best validators are in the pool, while poor ones are removed and even blacklisted. It’s a way to “set and forget” your SOL stake. 

Could you please highlight the role of SOL and swap in DeFi, so that our readers get a clarity?

SOL is the currency of the Solana ecosystem and it’s not only used for “gas” fees but many of the assets on the chain like NFTs are priced in SOL. Many Automated market makers have a SOL/X token pair so there is usually the most liquidity in a SOL token pair. Staked SOL helps secure the network and validators are rewarded with SOL token emissions they share with their stakers for their service. Liquid Staking, which is what Marinade does, enables stakers to not only get staking rewards but also use a liquid staking token, mSOL, so they can use it in DeFi and NFTs (as collateral, supply liquidity, use in derivatives trading, NFTs and more). An exciting new development on the chain is priority transactions so during times of heavy use (like an NFT mint or volatile market conditions), you can pay more SOL to get your transactions through. 

What are some of the challenges that you see in teams embracing new fintech solutions? What advice would you give to them?

First off it’s critical to work in spaces where your peers work. Especially in crypto everything is so shared and open source, you want to be collaborating in familiar environments (whether that’s notion or github or discord). The irony isn’t lost on me that Web3 is trying to challenge and dethrone web2 giants and yet so many of our meetings are in Google Meet. 

Teams may take for granted all the matured SaaS out there because crypto is trying to rebuild everything from scratch in a web3 ethos.  But they also need to be keyed into the promise of new tooling and identify and select a handful of tools that plug into their project where there could really be some exponential shared benefit, or they could even help build it. This may come from a Web-3 messaging service like Dialect (tl:dr push notifications for crypto wallets), and there are countless startups trying to build “decentralized google” or “wordpress” or “twitter” or “discord” etc. Marinade sees huge opportunity in on-chain governance tooling that will enable projects to move towards a fully decentralized and on-chain state, where everything from voting and protocol smart contracts to the treasuries are controlled in a totally transparent way. 

It’s a great time to be building in crypto right now because if you give someone an opinion on their product they will really take it to heart and if you have good enough dialogue with them you may even end up working on it. 

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What are your predictions for the crypto domain for 2025?

2025 feels like a long ways away from now. I’m eager to see regulatory clarity around stablecoins. It’s one of the real killer use cases in crypto that is already here. The ability to send USDC or USDT instantly for fractions of pennies to anyone in the world is extremely valuable to everyone no matter who you are., But lack of regulatory clarity, especially in the US, is harming its adoption. I also expect to see more adoption of decentralized exchanges. If the events of the past year have taught us anything it’s that humans in power will always be tempted by greed and do risky things with customer deposits they weren’t supposed to. These are tradfi problems reinvented in crypto, not crypto-native problems. Decentralized protocols are operating as intended. 

I would also keep an eye on the NFT space because we’re only really scratching the surface of use cases there. The whole concept of memberships, loyalty programs and in particular airdropping benefits to holders is going to be a technology that established companies are going to embrace sooner than later. 

Tell us about some of the top FinTech events that you’ll be participating in 2023.

On Solana we have a series of Hacker Houses that are always a lot of fun and it’s great to gather with the real builders in the ecosystem. I much prefer them because they are very collaborative in a workshop style with some smaller presentations versus these more gigantic, hype-filled conferences. SXSW is upon us and Concensus is shortly after, and I’ll be eager to reconvene with the Solana ecosystem at Breakpoint this fall. 

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We’d love to know what some of your future plans for Marinade Finance.

Even though Marinade is the first liquid-staking protocol (August 2021) and the largest protocol by TVL on Solana, it feels like we’ve just started our journey. Only 2% of stake on SOL is liquid staked. We’re working to bring more education to explain the benefits of liquid staking for all in the ecosystem. Marinade will continue building open-source, public goods tooling for the ecosystem that enables more liquidity, decentralization and performance of the network, and the previously mentioned governance tooling that helps the whole ecosystem grow together. 

Thank you, Brandon! That was fun and we hope to see you back on globalfintechseries.com soon.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]