Marginfi

Marginfi is a decentralized, overcollateralized lending protocol native to Solana that lets users supply crypto assets to earn yield and borrow against collateral — the foundational lending infrastructure that later evolved into Project 0, Solana's first multi-venue unified margin platform.

The Problem Marginfi Solved

Solana's DeFi ecosystem lacked a deep, native, composable money market in its early years. Marginfi launched in 2023 to fill that gap: a non-custodial protocol where capital suppliers earn variable interest and borrowers access liquidity against overcollateralized positions, all settling in seconds at near-zero cost on Solana's high-throughput network. The protocol was built by Mrgn Labs and quickly grew into one of Solana's largest lending venues by total value locked.

How mrgnlend Works

The core product, mrgnlend, operates as a peer-to-pool lending market. Rather than matching individual lenders and borrowers, all supplied assets flow into shared liquidity pools. Depositors receive tokens representing their pool share that continuously accrue interest; borrowers draw from those pools by posting collateral worth more than the amount borrowed.

Positions are tracked by a health factor — a ratio of weighted collateral value to outstanding liabilities. Each asset carries protocol-set loan-to-value (LTV) parameters: stablecoins typically receive LTVs of around 80%, while more volatile assets are set lower (50–65%). When a borrower's health factor falls below 1.0, liquidators can close a portion of the position — typically 10–20% of the undercollateralized amount — and collect a liquidation penalty that is split between the liquidator and a protocol insurance fund.

Interest rates adjust dynamically. As pool utilization rises (more of the deposited assets are borrowed), rates increase to attract new supply and curb demand. When utilization falls, rates drop. This mechanism keeps pools solvent and rates market-responsive without any manual governance intervention. During high-demand periods, SOL borrowing rates have reached 20% APY, while stablecoin lend rates have sat in the 5–8% range at normal utilization.

Market Structure

Marginfi organizes its pools into three distinct market types, each with different risk and capital-efficiency tradeoffs.

Global Market pools are the protocol's core markets for high-liquidity, well-established assets. Positions in different global-market pools share a single margin account, enabling cross-collateralization: SOL deposited in one pool can back a USDC borrow in another within the same account. This composability makes the global market the most capital-efficient tier.

Isolated Markets serve longer-tail or higher-volatility assets. Each isolated market pool carries independent risk parameters and cannot cross-collateralize with positions in other pools. Users who want exposure to newer or riskier tokens can participate without putting global-market collateral at risk.

Native Stake Market is a dedicated tier for liquid staking tokens (LSTs). Assets like JitoSOL, mSOL, and bSOL have distinct yield properties — they appreciate in SOL terms over time — which the native stake market accounts for in its pricing and collateral parameters. This makes it possible to borrow against LST collateral without penalizing the underlying staking yield.

Supported Assets

At launch and through its core operating period, Marginfi's main markets covered SOL, USDC, USDT, wBTC, wETH, and the major Solana LSTs — jitoSOL, mSOL, bSOL. The protocol also supported a long tail of Solana DeFi assets including BONK and JTO through isolated pools. The supported-asset list expanded over time as the community vetted new tokens for risk parameters.

Security and Risk Infrastructure

Marginfi was audited by OtterSec, one of the most active Solana-focused security firms. The protocol publishes its program deployments on Solana mainnet as verifiable builds. Price feeds are sourced from Pyth and Switchboard, with redundant oracle support designed to prevent manipulation-driven liquidations. An on-chain insurance fund absorbs bad debt from under-water liquidations that cannot be fully closed at prevailing market prices.

From Marginfi to Project 0

In 2025, Mrgn Labs announced that Marginfi's lending infrastructure would become the foundation for a broader product: Project 0 (0.xyz), described as the first generalized, permissionless, on-chain, multi-venue unified margin protocol on Solana.

Rather than building isolated money markets, Project 0 treats all of a user's assets across multiple DeFi venues as a single margin account. Users with assets deployed on Kamino, Drift, and Jupiter simultaneously can borrow against their entire portfolio in one transaction — the mrgnLendv2 on-chain program that powers the protocol handles the cross-venue collateral accounting. This architecture lets users run delta-neutral strategies across venues without facing separate liquidation risk on each leg.

The migration was announced alongside a token generation event (TGE) for the MRGN token, targeting Solana Breakpoint 2025. Existing Marginfi users' accumulated points transferred 1:1 to Project 0 points, with activity multipliers for users who maintained active deposits. The standalone Marginfi dApp (app.marginfi.com) was subsequently deprecated, redirecting users to the Project 0 interface. The underlying on-chain lending program, however, remains live and continues to settle transactions on Solana mainnet.

Ecosystem Position

During its active period as an independent dApp, Marginfi was consistently cited alongside Kamino and Solend as one of Solana's three largest lending protocols by TVL. It differentiated itself through clean UX, composable margin accounts, and deep SOL and stablecoin liquidity. Solana's throughput and sub-cent transaction fees made the frequent small-lot operations typical of DeFi lending — partial liquidations, rate-responsive borrowing, multi-step leverage loops — economically viable in a way that EVM networks could not match.

The protocol's evolution into Project 0 reflects a broader shift in Solana DeFi toward cross-protocol composability: rather than competing for liquidity in isolation, the next generation of Solana money markets treats capital deployed anywhere on the network as usable collateral everywhere. Marginfi's peer-to-pool foundation made that architecture possible.