Sunrise Stake

Sunrise Stake was a non-custodial, permissionless protocol on Solana that allowed SOL holders to passively direct their staking rewards toward carbon credit retirement and climate-positive projects, without surrendering custody of their assets or paying fees. The protocol ran as a volunteer-led open-source project for roughly three years before founder Daniel Kelleher announced a staged shutdown beginning March 2026.

How the Protocol Worked

The core mechanic was straightforward: a user deposited SOL into the Sunrise smart contract and received an equivalent amount of gSOL -- green SOL -- at a 1:1 ratio. gSOL is a standard Solana SPL token that holders could deploy across compatible Solana applications or redeem back for SOL at any time. Sunrise did not own or hold user SOL; the protocol acted as an intermediary rather than a custodian.

Under the hood, Sunrise did not stake SOL directly. Instead, it proxied two established liquid staking providers -- Marinade Finance and SolBlaze -- distributing deposited SOL across their validator networks. This design gave users two advantages over native staking: immediate or near-immediate liquidity when unstaking, and diversified stake exposure across hundreds of validators rather than a single account, strengthening Solana network decentralization.

Once per epoch, the protocol yield controller calculated the difference between the gSOL supply and the total underlying pool value. That difference -- the staking rewards accumulated during the epoch -- was extracted and sent to carbon credit retirement rather than returned to depositors. Sunrise charged zero fees; 100 percent of generated yield went to climate projects.

Carbon Credit Mechanism

Sunrise directed yield toward two carbon credit instruments:

Toucan NCT token, which represents one tonne of CO2 equivalent from verified nature-based carbon projects. Retiring NCT tokens permanently removes them from circulation, corresponding to an equivalent carbon offset.

EcoToken, which bridges Regen Network carbon credits onto Solana, connecting yield to projects verified under standards developed for regenerative land-use and ecosystem protection.

To automate the retirement process across chains, the team built an open-source, permissionless Offset Bridge capable of retiring carbon credits on Polygon and Celo blockchains from Solana-originated yield.

Validator Green Stake Program

Beyond yield routing, Sunrise collaborated with the Solana Foundation on a green stake pool designed to incentivize validators to adopt renewable energy sources. Validators meeting renewable energy criteria received preferential stake allocation from the pool, creating a direct financial signal for cleaner infrastructure within the Solana network itself.

Impact

Over the operational lifetime of the protocol, Sunrise Stake offset more than 20,000 tonnes of CO2 by the end of 2025 -- a figure the team described as equivalent to two millennia of a Western household annual emissions. The protocol also channeled direct donations to four charities and collectives focused on climate and regenerative finance work. Supported carbon credit issuers included Toucan Finance and EcoToken, with Regen Network as an upstream source.

Shutdown

On March 2, 2026, founder Daniel Kelleher published the shutdown announcement titled "From Sunrise to Sunset: Shutting down Solana's Climate Staking Platform," signaling a staged wind-down of the protocol. Two factors drove the decision: the increasing difficulty of sourcing reliable and diversified carbon credits, and the regulatory, legal, and tax overhead that had become unsustainable for a small, volunteer-run organization.

The shutdown proceeded in distinct phases. New deposits were disabled in March 2026. From March through June 2026, existing positions continued operating normally with yield flowing to carbon projects. From June through December 2026, the protocol entered sunset mode and remaining yield was redirected to a Solana ReFi community wallet rather than external carbon markets. From 2027 through 2028, the team planned a long-tail support period via decentralized storage and GitHub archives, with the sunrisestake.com domain scheduled to eventually close.

Throughout the process, user funds remained fully withdrawable. Holders of gSOL could redeem via the app at app.sunrisestake.com; those with locked NFT-based stake positions were directed to unlock first and then wait the standard two-to-three day unstaking window before funds became available.

Team and Ecosystem

Sunrise Stake was built and maintained by a volunteer team including Daniel Kelleher, Ronny Haase, Jan Meyling, and Marta Kotlarska. The project received support from the Solana Foundation and maintained working relationships with Marinade Finance, SolBlaze, Toucan Finance, EcoToken, and ReFiDAO.

The protocol source code across the main app, yield controller, offset bridge, and supporting tooling was published under the sunrise-stake GitHub organization and remained available as an open-source reference for similar regenerative finance projects following the shutdown.

Significance in the Solana Ecosystem

Sunrise Stake was one of the earliest and most operationally mature ReFi (regenerative finance) experiments on Solana, demonstrating that yield-bearing DeFi primitives could be wired to real-world environmental outcomes without requiring users to give up custody of assets or pay fees. The protocol attracted support from the Solana Foundation and collaborated with established liquid staking protocols, indicating meaningful ecosystem integration during its active period. Its three-year run produced verifiable carbon retirement at scale before the combination of tightening carbon credit markets and volunteer capacity limits made continued operation untenable.