Sep 1, 2025
I recently co-founded Pye, a new DeFi protocol on Solana that enables DeFi at the validator layer.
I took a break from crypto for the last 2 years.
Last summer, my friend and former Vancouverite Erik Ashdown reached out to me with a product idea he was tinkering with in the validator space. The idea was simple, what happens if you could sell your staking rewards in chain A for rewards in chain B?
Erik and I got to work over the summer. We originally started the project on Ethereum. My focus was on the mechanism design and engineering, while Erik focused on early product and getting feedback from the market. Over the course of the summer, we realized that this product had much much more demand on Solana than anywhere else. We pivoted to Solana.
The initial mechanism was simple, it consisted in separating stake accounts into principal and reward components. These components would be represented by SPL tokens. The mechanism was similar to Pendle's yield stripping model, however unlike Pendle we did not make this design decision for price dsicovery reasons but to allow traders to swap yield components between chains.
Colosseum was launching the Radar Hackathon around September 2025. We decided to participate and build a prototype of the product there.
We won 3rd place at the Radar Hackathon (DeFi category).
December 2025
Excited to announce we raised a $5M seed round from Variant, Coinbase to transform the $500B staking market into an onchain fixed-income marketplace.