Deniz 
Lead by Polychain Capital, Solayer Labs—developer of the Solana restaking protocol—has raised $12 million in a seed fundraising round. Solayer Labs said Tuesday other investors in the round included Big Brain Holdings, Hack VC, Nomad Capital, Race Capital, ABCDE, and Arthur Hayes’ family firm Maelstrom. Designed as a straightforward agreement for future equity (SAFE) with token warrants, co-founder Rachel Chu told the round concluded in May. Chu said the fundraising round raised Solayer’s valuation to $80 million.
Binance Labs reportedly invested in Solayer earlier this month. Chu said the company’s investment falls under the same $12 million startup fund. Solayer also revealed last month a pre-seed fundraising round of an unidentified amount from angel investors, including Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.
What is Solayer?
Designed after the trailblazing Ethereum restaking system EigenLayer, Solayer is a Solana restaking system. Restaking lets users maximize their returns by locking their staked assets once again in various protocols, so-called actively verified services (AVSs), so receiving extra incentives. Supporting a range of staked assets, including Jito SOL, other liquid staking tokens, or any Solana-based token, Jito, a Solana liquid staking protocol, also joined the Solana restaking arena last month after the Jito Foundation published the code for Jito restaking.
Chu said, “Unlike EigenLayer and Jito, which initially focus on exogeneous AVSs (e.g., cross-chain bridges, oracles, shared sequencers, and other non-mainnet systems), Solayer aims to start with native Solana on-chain dApps (referred to as endogenous AVSs) and assist them in reserving block space and prioritizing transaction inclusion based on the amount of stake delegated to them.”
Solayer initially turns SOL into an intermediary form called sSOL-raw, the liquid staking token (LST) provided by the stake pool management, enabling native Solana (SOL) restaking, according to its website. After additional interaction with the Solayer restaking pool management, the site notes, the sSOL-raw is then transformed to sSOL. Solayer claims on its website to have rested over $186 million from about 104,500 depositors within weeks of its start. Based on DeFiLlama, Solana’s 13th largest protocol ranks here.
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