Crypto firm Pye Finance announced on Monday that it has secured funding through a seed round to help unlock $75 billion of staked Solana by allowing clients to trade their locked-in positions in an active marketplace, as per an official press release.
Currently, around 414 million SOL tokens sit in staked accounts, a market that Pye Finance will be targeting with its trading feature.
The seed round was valued at $5 million, which was led by Variant and Coinbase Ventures, alongside participation from Solana Labs, Nascent, Gemini, and other investors.
“Validators have become the underbanked layer of Web3,” said Pye’s co-founder Erik Ashdown.
“We’re building the financial infrastructure that lets them operate like asset managers — offering structured products, predictable returns, and better transparency for stakers.”
For the most part, staking accounts are usually held passively, allowing holders of those accounts to earn a yield with time. This new update is expected to make interactions with staked amounts of Solana more flexible and easier.
With the new update, locked-in positions can be traded on the secondary market through a split of tokens into principal tokens (PT) and reward tokens (RT).
“We expect Pye’s staking marketplace to fundamentally change how staking operates on Solana,” said Variant’s investor Alana Levin.
“By allowing validators and stakers to better align their preferences — for example, enabling validators to offer higher yields in exchange for longer lockups — Pye creates a more efficient, transparent, and incentive-aligned staking ecosystem.”