Developer Solayer Labs Solana brush
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Re-staking protocol Solayer has raised $12 million in a seed funding round led by Polychain Capital. Other investors in the round include Big Brain Holdings, Hack VC, Nomad Capital, Race Capital, ABCDE, and Arthur Hayes’ family office Maelstrom, Solayer Labs said Tuesday.
The round closed in May and was structured as a simple future equity agreement (SAFE) with token warrants, co-founder Rachel Chu told The Block. The funding round brought Solayer’s valuation to $80 million, Chu added.
Earlier this month, Binance Labs announced that it had invested in Solayer. Chu said the investment was part of the same $12 million seed round. Last month, Solayer announced a pre-seed funding round of undisclosed size from angel investors including Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.
What is Solayer?
Solayer is a Solana re-staking protocol modeled after the pioneering Ethereum re-staking protocol, EigenLayer. Re-staking allows users to maximize their returns by re-locking their staked assets to other protocols (called Active Validated Services (AVS)) to earn additional rewards.
Last month, Jito, a Solana liquid staking protocol, also entered the Solana staking space. With the Jito Foundation releasing Jito staking code, various staking assets including JitoSOL, other liquid staking tokens, or Solana-based tokens began to be supported.
When asked how Solayer differs from other re-staking platforms, Chu said, “Unlike EigenLayer and Jito, which initially focused on exogenous AVS (e.g. cross-chain bridges, oracles, shared sequencers, and other non-mainnet systems), Solayer starts with native Solana on-chain dApps (called endogenous AVS) that support reserving block space and prioritizing transaction inclusion based on the amount of delegated stake.”
For native Solana (SOL) restaking, Solayer first converts SOL into an intermediate form called sSOL-raw, which according to the website is a liquid staking token (LST) issued by the stake pool manager. sSOL-raw is then converted into sSOL after interacting again with the Solayer restaking pool manager.
Solayer claims on its website that it has reinvested over $186 million from approximately 104,500 depositors in the first few weeks since its launch. It is currently the 13th largest protocol on Solana, according to DeFiLlama.
Solayer Plans and Tokens
With the new funding, Solayer plans to expand its team, integrate new protocols, and prepare for the second phase of its platform.
Chu added that Solayer, which is based in San Francisco, currently has eight employees and plans to hire several more across functions including growth, institutional partnerships and engineering.
Solayer also plans to launch its own token in the future, which Chu said is “in the works.”
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