Pye Finance has successfully secured $5 million in a seed funding round, with Variant and Coinbase Ventures leading the investment, as stated in a press release issued on Monday.
This round also saw participation from Solana Labs, Nascent, Gemini, and several others, according to the company.
The startup aims to create a marketplace on the Solana blockchain for time-locked staking positions, facilitating the transferability of locked stakes and enabling the structuring of fixed-term products.
Pye targets a substantial amount of staked SOL on the Solana network—over 414 million tokens, valued at around $75 billion at current rates—that are held in basic staking accounts. Typically, these positions are non-customizable and non-tradable once locked, which constrains how validators attract stake and how stakers manage their liquidity.
The company is working on an enhancement that would let validators define parameters such as lockups and reward distributions, and tokenize a locked staking position into two components: a principal token redeemable for the underlying SOL at the end of the term, and a rewards token for staking rewards due at maturity.
Pye asserts that this framework will enable stakers to either sell their exposure to future rewards or leverage their positions in other decentralized finance (DeFi) strategies while still being staked.
“Validators represent the underbanked segment of Web3,” remarked Erik Ashdown, co-founder of Pye, in the release. “We’re constructing the financial infrastructure to empower them to function like asset managers—providing structured products, predictable returns, and enhanced transparency for stakers.”
Pye was established by Erik Ashdown and Alberto Cevallos.
The company mentioned that it conducted a closed alpha earlier this year and is set to launch a private beta in the first quarter of 2026.
Read more: Jane Street Leads $105M Funding for Antithesis, a Testing Tool Used by Ethereum Network
