Phase Labs

Phase Labs is a Solana-native infrastructure and financial tools company founded in 2021 and operating under the brand "Phase" at phase.cc. The team describes its mission as making crypto simple, secure, and accessible — building products across staking infrastructure, liquid staking, stake pool management, institutional compliance, governance, and on-chain tax reporting. Since launch, Phase has grown to more than $700 million in assets staked and holds a SOC-2 certification.

The Problem

Staking on Solana is fragmented across infrastructure quality, liquidity, and compliance requirements. Retail stakers face trade-offs between earning rewards and keeping their SOL liquid. Institutional stakers — funds, custodians, and ETF issuers — need compliant, audited infrastructure that can satisfy securities regulators. Meanwhile, Solana's growing DeFi activity creates tax reporting complexity that generic multi-chain tools handle poorly. Phase Labs addresses all three segments under one roof.

Core Products

Phase Stake and the YIELD Liquid Staking Token

Phase operates its own Solana validator on bare-metal servers with MEV-optimized configurations and a 99.9% uptime SLA. The validator charges zero percent commission. Stakers can choose between native staking — locking SOL directly to the Phase validator — or receiving YIELD, Phase's liquid staking token.

YIELD represents staked SOL that accrues validator rewards automatically. One YIELD token converts at approximately 1.121 SOL, reflecting accumulated staking yield since inception. YIELD holders retain liquidity: the token can be deployed in Solana DeFi protocols or instantly redeemed for SOL. The withdraw authority keypair for validator rewards is held in a Squads multisig, adding an institutional-grade custody layer.

Aero Pool

Aero is Phase's stake pool product, directing delegated capital toward validators that actively contribute to the Solana ecosystem — builders, educators, and teams developing tooling. The pool manages more than $80 million delegated across more than 100 validators. By spreading stake broadly, Aero supports network decentralization while providing guidance to new teams establishing their own nodes.

Sentinel Stake

Sentinel Stake is Phase's institutional product, targeting funds, custodians, and Exchange-Traded Product (ETP) issuers that require certified, compliant staking infrastructure. Sentinel manages $30 million in assets under management and offers branded validator solutions where institutional clients operate validators under their own identity while Phase provides the underlying infrastructure.

In May 2025, Phase co-founder and CMO Sebastian Moriarty met with the SEC's Crypto Task Force to advocate for regulatory clarity around staking within Solana ETPs. The discussion covered three issues: stake centralization risk (noting Solana's Nakamoto Coefficient of 19), cybersecurity standards for ETP-linked validators (proposing SOC 2 and ISO 27001 as baseline requirements), and ensuring competitive market access for smaller, qualified staking providers in ETP validator sets.

Netrunner

Netrunner (netrunner.tax) is Phase's Solana-native crypto tax reporting tool, designed to handle the transaction complexity of Solana's high-throughput activity. Users connect Solana wallets, and the platform automatically labels transactions — swaps, staking rewards, NFT trades, DeFi interactions — using protocol-specific rules. An AI layer suggests labels for unclassified transactions with confidence scores.

Reports export in CSV and PDF formats compatible with 13 jurisdictions including the US (FIFO/LIFO), UK (HMRC), Canada (CRA), Germany, Japan, and Australia, with pre-filled tax forms per jurisdiction. Protocol integrations cover Jupiter, Raydium, Orca, Kamino, Meteora, Magic Eden, Tensor, and Pump.fun. Pricing tiers range from a free plan covering 30,000 transactions per year to a Pro plan at $189 per year for up to 100,000 transactions.

Align

Align is Phase's governance platform, enabling communities to conduct transparent on-chain decision-making, manage operations, and host hackathons. The protocol received funding from the Solana Foundation. Align is designed around what Phase calls "CommuniFi" — infrastructure for community-led financial and organizational management.

Ideapad

Ideapad is Phase's on-chain crowdfunding product, allowing users to back early-stage Solana projects and earn rewards based on participation.

Team

Phase Labs was co-founded and is led by Brandon Geraldi (CEO), Adam Carter (CTO), Dan Trilo (CFO), Gabriel Hicks (Head of Staking), and Sebastian Moriarty (co-founder, CMO). The company operates from within the Solana ecosystem with integrations across Phantom, Solflare, and Magic Eden.

Ecosystem Position

Phase operates across the full staking lifecycle on Solana — from infrastructure-layer validators through liquid tokens, institutional compliance products, ecosystem delegation, and the tax reporting layer that closes the loop for end users. The Aero Pool's broad delegation across 100-plus validators makes Phase an active participant in Solana network health and decentralization, while Sentinel Stake's engagement with the SEC positions the company at the regulatory frontier of Solana-based ETPs.