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 staking positions, an effort to make locked stake transferable and easier to structure into fixed-term products.

Pye’s pitch is aimed at a large base of staked SOL on Solana, more than 414 million tokens, worth about $75 billion at current prices, that sit in basic staking accounts. These positions typically can’t be customized or traded once locked, limiting how validators compete for stake and how stakers manage liquidity, the firm said.

The company said it is developing an upgrade that would allow validators to set parameters such as lockups and reward flows, and to tokenize a locked staking position into two assets: a principal token redeemable for the underlying SOL at the end of the term, and a rewards token that represents staking rewards payable at maturity.

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,” said Erik Ashdown, co-founder of Pye, in the release. “We’re building the financial infrastructure that lets them operate like asset managers — offering structured products, predictable returns, and better transparency for stakers.”

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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