Pye Finance has raised a $5 million seed round led by Variant and Coinbase Ventures, the company said 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 stake positions, an effort to make locked-in stakes transferable and easier to structure into time-limited products.
Pye’s pitch targets a large base of SOL staked on Solana, more than 414 million tokens, worth about $75 billion at current prices, sitting in basic staking accounts. These positions typically cannot be adjusted or traded once locked, limiting how validators compete for stakes and how stakers manage liquidity, the firm said.
The company said it is developing an upgrade that will allow validators to set parameters such as lockups and reward streams, and tokenize a locked stake position into two assets: a main token that can be redeemed for the underlying SOL at the end of the term, and a reward token that represents stake rewards payable at expiration.
Pye says this structure could allow stakers to sell exposure to future rewards or use positions in other decentralized finance (DeFi) strategies while remaining staked.
“Validators have become the underbanked layer of Web3,” Erik Ashdown, co-founder of Pye, said in the release. “We build the financial infrastructure that lets them act 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 ran a closed alpha earlier this year and plans to launch a private beta in the first quarter of 2026.
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