Getting Started

Introduction to Marian

Marian is a decentralized equity-backed money market. It compresses four traditional financial primitives — brokerage, dividend custody, prime brokerage margin, and money-market lending — into a single on-chain protocol on the Robinhood Chain - Testnet.

The problem

The average retail investor holds fragmented, illiquid capital. Their equity sits in a brokerage account earning dividends taxed at ordinary income; their cash sits in a savings account earning below CPI; and any margin they access is priced at broker-defined spreads with limited transparency. Meanwhile, DeFi has produced deep stablecoin markets but no native way to collateralize genuine, dividend-producing US equity risk.

Marian closes that gap. A single deposit gives the user (a) equity exposure, (b) on-chain dividend cash flow, (c) a productive collateral asset, and (d) a native governance and fee-capture token.

Core primitives

$MRN

Governance

1B max supply, deflationary

Baskets

ERC-4626

tokenized equity vaults

veMRN

6–48 mo

lock for yield boost

mUSD

Stablecoin

borrowed against locks

End-to-end user journey

The canonical Marian position combines all four modules. A user deposits 10,000 USDC, purchases a basket, locks it for 24 months, and borrows 60% of its value as mUSD to redeploy elsewhere. The numbers below are illustrative but derived directly from live protocol parameters.

Step	Action	Balance	Effect
1	Deposit USDC → mint basket MRN-SP7	10,000.00	Buy 10k of top-7 S&P basket
2	Auto-stream dividends (est.)	+165.00 / yr	1.65% avg dividend yield
3	Lock basket for 24 months → veMRN boost 1.75×	17,500 vePts	Boosted CF: 60% → 72%
4	Borrow 6,000 mUSD at 4.85% APR	6,000.00	LTV 60%, HF 1.85
5	Locker fee share (70% of borrow interest)	+203.70 / yr	Paid in mUSD monthly
6	$MRN emissions (boosted)	+412 MRN / yr	Vests over 90 days

Compounding identity

Under baseline parameters, a locked basket produces a gross yield of 8.9% APY in blended dividends, borrow-fee share, and boosted $MRN emissions — before the user redeploys the borrowed mUSD. The full derivation lives in Mathematical Model.

Why the Robinhood Chain - Testnet

The Robinhood Chain - Testnet is an EVM-equivalent L2 with sub-100ms blocks, deterministic ordering, and a native KYC oracle used by regulated market makers. Marian inherits three properties that matter for a securities protocol:

Sub-cent settlement — dividend distributions of a few dollars are economically viable per user.
MEV-resistant sequencing — basket rebalances quote at NAV, not at a sandwich-attackable spread.
On-chain identity — the KYC oracle gates access to regulated basket tranches without exposing PII.

Design principles

Every rate is a formula, not a policy. Borrow APR, boost multipliers, dividend routing — all derived from published curves. No off-chain interest committee.
Collateral must be productive. Idle collateral is capital destruction. Locked baskets keep earning dividends and emissions while backing loans.
Fees flow to lockers. 70% of protocol revenue is returned to veMRN holders, 20% to the insurance module, 10% to treasury.
No principal loss without a health-factor breach. Liquidations are partial (max 50% of debt per event) and priced with a 6% penalty cap.

← Previous

Overview

Protocol Architecture