Cashmere

Cashmere was a multi-signature wallet built specifically for the Solana blockchain, designed to help startups, DAOs, and enterprise teams manage shared crypto treasuries without relying on a single individual's wallet. The project's tagline — "A Safer Wallet, Built for Business" — captured its core thesis: that organizations operating on Solana needed institutional-grade custody tools, not the single-key wallets designed for individual retail users. Y Combinator accepted Cashmere into its Winter 2022 batch, and the company raised a $3 million seed round at a $30 million valuation in August 2022. As of 2025, YC lists the company as inactive, GitHub activity stopped in mid-2022, and the Twitter account shows no recent posts.

The Problem Cashmere Addressed

Most early Solana applications — DAOs, protocol treasuries, startup token reserves — were managed from a single hot wallet controlled by one founder or employee. This created a single point of failure: one compromised key meant total loss of funds. Cashmere's goal was to bring the equivalent of a corporate bank account to Solana, where no single party could unilaterally move organizational funds without the agreement of co-owners.

How Cashmere Worked

Cashmere deployed an on-chain multi-signature program on Solana mainnet at program address AzHKmHjEoZ7JqiTUPgPVAZgtyNLwa3BTsRgffYxCVDD. The program handled the full multi-sig lifecycle:

Wallet creation. An organization would deploy a new multi-sig account by specifying a list of co-owners and an approval threshold. For example, a team of four could require any three members to sign before a transaction executes — a 3-of-4 setup. Any positive integer combination of m-of-n was supported.

Transaction proposals and approvals. Any owner could propose an outbound transaction. Other co-owners would then individually approve it through the Cashmere interface. Once the threshold of approvals was reached, the transaction could be executed on-chain.

Dynamic owner management. The program supported post-deployment changes to the owner set and approval threshold, a feature tracked using an ownerSetSeqno version counter to prevent replay attacks or stale approvals after ownership changes.

Program Derived Addresses. Cashmere used Solana's native PDA mechanism to derive wallet authority accounts deterministically. This also enabled escrow-like capabilities for applications that needed conditional or jointly controlled token custody.

The Cashmere application built a consumer-friendly dashboard on top of this program, presenting pending transactions, historical activity, and current holdings in a clear interface. The stated goal was to approximate the UX of Phantom — Solana's most widely used retail wallet — but applied to collaborative, multi-party treasury management.

Asset Support and Integrations

Cashmere supported SOL and any SPL token, covering the full breadth of fungible assets on Solana at launch. The wallet was integrated with all major Solana wallet adapters, including hardware wallets such as Ledger, allowing co-owners to use their existing signing infrastructure. Phantom's mobile app could be used to approve pending multi-sig transactions, making the workflow accessible without a desktop browser.

Cashmere also integrated Solana Name Service (SNS), allowing users to send to .sol domains rather than raw public keys — reducing address-entry errors during high-value transfers.

At the protocol layer, Cashmere built alongside Goki Protocol, which was at the time the largest multisig protocol by total value locked on Solana. Cashmere's application layer used Goki's underlying smart wallet infrastructure while providing its own opinionated interface and enterprise-focused feature set.

Security and Audit

Cashmere's on-chain program was audited by OtterSec, a Solana-specialized smart contract security firm, in June 2022. The audit report was published publicly on Cashmere's GitHub organization under the repository cashmere-inc/multisig-audit-report. This placed Cashmere ahead of many early Solana projects that launched without independent security reviews. Independent commentary at the time also noted that limited public documentation and no published formal roadmap were concerns for risk-conscious users considering adoption.

Team

Cashmere was founded by three engineers:

• Shashank Khanna (CEO): Previously an engineer at Amazon and SoFi.
• Rebecca Lee (CTO): Background at Facebook, Retool, and Affirm, with experience building developer-facing infrastructure.
• Charlotte McGinn: Software engineer with a background in Tesla's data infrastructure team.

The team was three people at the time of the YC batch, and the company was headquartered in San Francisco.

Path to YC and Early Traction

Before Y Combinator, Cashmere competed in the Convergence hackathon organized by Serum and Wormhole, where it placed fifth. That showing led to selection for the Serum accelerator program, which in turn provided visibility ahead of the YC application. Y Combinator's public announcement noted that Cashmere offered "institutional grade security and enterprise wallet management to companies with assets on Solana, protecting them even if hot wallets get compromised."

The company listed partnerships with Bonfida, OpenSea, and Cega among early integrations and ecosystem relationships.

Status

Cashmere is no longer active. YC lists the company as inactive. GitHub activity stopped in mid-2022 and the @CashmereWallet Twitter account shows no recent posts. The on-chain program at AzHKmHjEoZ7JqiTUPgPVAZgtyNLwa3BTsRgffYxCVDD remains deployed on Solana mainnet — previously created multi-sig accounts remain technically accessible on-chain — but the application layer Cashmere built on top is no longer maintained.

The multi-sig segment of Solana's ecosystem consolidated quickly after 2022. Squads Protocol, which emerged around the same period addressing the same problem of shared organizational custody, continued active development and became the dominant Solana multi-sig platform. Cashmere's story illustrates that dynamic: the problem it identified was real and well-timed, but category leadership went to a competitor that sustained development through the bear market.