Pye Finance has raised a $5 million seed round led by Variant and Coinbase Ventures, the company said in a press release on Monday.
The round also saw 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, an effort to make locked staking transferable and easier to structure into fixed-term products.
Pye’s proposal targets a large base of SOL staked on Solana, more than 414 million tokens, worth around $75 billion at current prices, held in basic staking accounts. These positions typically cannot be customized or traded once locked, limiting how validators compete for staking and how stakeholders manage liquidity, the firm said.
The company said it is developing an update that would allow validators to set parameters such as locks and reward flows, and tokenize a locked staking position into two assets: a master token redeemable for the underlying SOL at the end of the term, and a reward token representing staking rewards payable at expiration.
Pye says this structure could allow participants to sell exposure to future rewards or use positions in other decentralized finance (DeFi) strategies while remaining staked.
“Validators have become the unbanked layer of Web3,” Pye co-founder Erik Ashdown said in the statement. “We are building the financial infrastructure that allows them to operate as asset managers, offering structured products, predictable returns and greater transparency for stakeholders.”
Pye was founded by Erik Ashdown and Alberto Cevallos.
The company said it held a closed alpha earlier this year and plans to launch a private beta in the first quarter of 2026.
Read more: Jane Street leads $105 million funding for Antithesis, a testing tool used by the Ethereum network
