Spout Finance's $2 million round leaves the beta off mainnet
Spout Finance's $2 million round is for 0% loans on tokenised US stocks. The release and the company site still keep the Solana lending beta off mainnet.
Spout Finance has announced a $2 million strategic round to lend USD Coin (USDC) against tokenised US equities at a borrower rate the company calls 0%. The GlobeNewswire release of October 15, 2026 places that product off mainnet and puts the beta on Solana Devnet at beta.spout.finance. The company's October 15 post repeats the devnet line. Lender payment, the release says, is covered-call premium written against the collateral, a company account of the payout rather than a guaranteed yield.
The release names Draper Dragon, Anchorage Digital, Flow Traders, Taisu Ventures, Vessel Capital, Solayer, 2Square Capital, Bering Waters Ventures and Blockstreet Capital, with strategic backing from Solana Labs. Angels include Solana Labs co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, and J. Christopher Giancarlo, 13th chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the company's regulatory and policy adviser. The October 15 post leaves Blockstreet Capital out of that fund sentence, while organisation data on the spout.finance homepage still lists Blockstreet among funders.
Devnet on the wire, testnet on the older page
The October 15 post confirms the devnet beta and says a private beta launches soon. A learn page dated August 24, 2026 still says the beta is officially live on Solana Testnet. That page cites an @SpoutFi post from the same evening, which uses the Testnet wording and invites borrowing at 0% annual percentage rate. Solana runs Devnet and Testnet as separate clusters, so the October 15 materials and the August 24 post disagree.
The testnet terms name Spout Finance Inc. and call the environment a simulated pre-release test whose tokens, balances, loans and positions carry zero monetary value. They define mainnet as a later production deployment and omit the word devnet. beta.spout.finance returned a Cloudflare block on October 26, 2026.
How the company funds the 0% rate
The release says users post tokenised US equities, borrow USDC at a flat 50% loan-to-value, and pay 0% interest while the loan stays open, because weekly far-out-of-the-money covered calls are written against the collateral and lenders are paid from that premium. The homepage says borrowers can take USDC up to 50% of collateral value. A flat 50% ratio and a ceiling of up to 50% are different terms, and the two pages disagree.
The broker comparison in the release is the company's comparison. It says Charles Schwab and Fidelity charge individual investors 12.075% a year on margin balances under $25,000, that Schwab's base margin rate is 10.25%, and that the effective federal funds rate is 3.88%. It puts typical private-bank securities-based lending at 4% to 6%. The October 15 post adds Vanguard at 12.25% and E*TRADE at 12.70%, two rates the wire omits.
"Borrowing against your own portfolio has always been a product for people who already had a private banker. I do not think it should be," said Marc Ryan, co-founder and chief executive of Spout Finance, in the GlobeNewswire release.
The homepage adds Treasury bill yield on unlent cash beside the covered-call premium, a protocol fee of 20% of gross premium or 10% while an insurance fund is at its target, and model targets of about 9% senior and about 32% junior, with the guarantee withheld. Losses hit the insurance fund, then junior, before senior. The page lists 11 tokenised stocks and exchange-traded funds, liquidation thresholds from 54.1% to 62.5%, and an 85% utilisation cap. Exercised calls can leave slightly fewer tokens. The product is unavailable in the United States and its territories, Canada and sanctioned countries.
The @SpoutFi profile, read on October 26, says anyone can borrow against equities anywhere at 0% annual percentage rate and points readers at beta.spout.finance. That anywhere sits beside the United States bar on the homepage. Anchorage Digital and Flow Traders are on the round. The "Working with" row lists Coinbase, Circle, Stripe, Bitget, Ondo, Paxos, Dinari, MoonPay and Backpack on a logo row.
Hong Kong's first tokenised covered-call ETF is the listed parallel: premium taken in exchange for upside above a strike. Aave Arc is the interest-bearing shape, a permissioned pool in which the borrower pays the lender. Hylo's raise, led by Solana Ventures, is a separate Solana round aimed at hyUSD. The Spout round funds a team and a credit layer for issuers, exchanges and wallets. Private-beta access is described as launching soon, via @SpoutFi or @0xmryan. A mainnet date is absent from the release, the October 15 post, the August 24 post and the testnet terms, so the 0% rate and the tranche targets stay inside that test environment.
This article is informational analysis only and is not financial, investment, or trading advice. Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile and can lose substantial value rapidly. Past performance and historical patterns do not guarantee future results. Do your own research and consult a regulated financial adviser before making any investment decision.
Reporting by Karthik Subramanian. Filed 26 October 2026, 17:11 GMT.
Digital Assets Correspondent
Karthik Subramanian is a founder, writer, and technology consultant with nine years in the crypto ecosystem.
