We’re thrilled to announce our lead investment in Pye, a new yield and stake trading protocol on Solana.

Solana has become one of the most active ecosystems in crypto, yet its staking layer still resembles the earliest days of the network. Tens of billions in SOL sit in native stake accounts that are illiquid, hard to price, and offer little flexibility for validators and stakers. Validators often compete publicly on commission rates, but the most mutually beneficial deals are frequently limited to bespoke agreements with institutional players. Pye seeks to improve access and efficiency for both validators and stakers.

Pye’s core product is a staking marketplace for Solana. Validators can offer more transparent, term-based staking opportunities. In turn, stakers can select based on yield, duration, and reward structure. An example of a new stake agreement on Pye’s marketplace might look like a user committing to stake to a validator for 12 months in exchange for a higher percentage of the yield (block rewards, MEV, and network inflation). The validator gets greater stability in its committed stake, while the user earns more for an activity they were planning on doing anyway.

Each position in Pye’s system is tokenized into two parts: the principal and the yield (i.e. the staking rewards). In doing so, Pye creates a way for users to trade stake: long-term stakers can sell their yield streams to pull funds forward, third parties can buy others’ locked stake, and more. The result is greater liquidity, programmability, and composability to a system that has been historically rigid. Pye transforms stake from merely a service into a tradable asset.

We believe this unlock is overdue for Solana – and Pye is one of the first teams we’ve seen approaching it with both product rigor and long-term vision.

We believe Pye is set to become a critical component of Solana’s yield infrastructure. Its marketplace unlocks choice for stakers, differentiation for validators, and new paths for price discovery on staked yield. It also lays the foundation for more advanced financial products – where stake positions can be traded, hedged, integrated into DeFi, or composed into structured yield strategies. On the whole, it creates an entirely new way to begin utilizing stake on Solana.

Pye was founded by deeply technical operators who know this problem from the inside. Erik Ashdown (CEO) previously led go-to-market at Covalent, a blockchain infrastructure company, while Alberto Cevallos (CTO) co-founded BadgerDAO. Their clarity of thought and execution speed stood out immediately. We couldn’t be more excited to support them as they build what we believe can become foundational yield infrastructure for Solana.

If you’re a validator or staking provider exploring new ways to access capital, structure yield, or simply earn more, check out the protocol at pye.fi.

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