Pye Finance has raised a $5 million seed round led by Variant and Coinbase Ventures, the company announced in a press release Monday.
The round also included participation from Solana Labs, Nascent, Gemini and others, the company said.
The startup is building an on-chain marketplace on Solana for time-locked staking positions, with the goal of making locked stakes transferable and easier to structure into futures products.
Pye’s pitch targets a large base of SOL staked on Solana, more than 414 million tokens, worth approximately $75 billion at current prices, which are in base staking accounts. These positions generally cannot be customized or traded once locked, limiting how validators compete for stakes and how investors manage liquidity, the company said.
The company said it was developing an upgrade that would allow validators to set parameters such as locks and reward streams, and tokenize a locked staking position into two assets: a master token exchangeable for the underlying SOL at the end of the term and a reward token that represents staking rewards payable at maturity.
Pye says this structure could allow investors to sell exposure to future rewards or use positions in other decentralized finance (DeFi) strategies while remaining invested.
“Validators have become the underbanked layer of Web3,” Erik Ashdown, co-founder of Pye, said in the release. “We are building the financial infrastructure that allows them to operate as asset managers, offering structured products, predictable returns and better transparency for stakeholders.”
Pye was founded by Erik Ashdown and Alberto Cevallos.
The company said it completed a closed alpha earlier this year and plans to launch a private beta in the first quarter of 2026.
Learn more: Jane Street leads $105 million in funding for Antithesis, a testing tool used by the Ethereum network
