Read Our X AMA

Last week, we held an AMA on X where our community was welcomed to tag us in any questions and members of our Sundial technical team, Sam and Vic, along with Sundial CEO Sheldon responded directly from their X accounts.

Below are some of the key questions and answers asked by our community and answered by our team.

Ask us Anything
Have questions about Sundial tokenomics or our roadmap? Today, the Sundial core team will be answering your questions directly from their personal accounts.

Ask us anything about

• Why Sundial has no new token (BTC is the native asset) • How fees, bonds & rewards work • Our governance • Treasury reserves & BTC yield • Or general questions about our protocol, the team and our mission.

Drop your questions in the replies below — we’ll be responding throughout the day.

How do you convince & ensure confidence for BTC holders to use Sundial? Especially those who are against using BTC to do DeFi stuff due to hacks?

From the more technical side, we have several key advantages that make us much more secure than currently existing solutions.

UTxO Model with Transactional Determinism: this allows for easy formal verification of dapps and our protocol itself: basically showing with math that and smart contract works the way it claims it does and there's no holes in security. Previously these formal verifications were extremely expensive, but we expect to be able to use one of several new tools to let teams do this much more quickly & cheaply.
BitVM level of trust: Most BTC holders have already decided that BitVM is great, even though it's technically not fully trustless, but 1-of-n. Everything in the Sundial L2 and Bridges are built with this same level of trust. or made fully trustless. This should be a much easier sell than the multisig-secured bridges & sidechains currently available, which have already proven to be faulty.
Check Point and other institutional partners: We're working with some pretty major partners in the world of traditional finance to help guarantee the security of everything from the bridges to the L2 to the yield platform. Some of those are TBA, but Check Point is a great example that I know I can talk about - Check Point provides the security tools that banks and merchants use to protect their payment processing systems. They work with tons of high profile clients, including some of the biggest telecom and investing companies in the world. This is the type of pedigree that we plan to present to the BTC world.

How does Sundial L1 connect with Bitcoin & Cardano? & What's the role of Check Point specifically in ensuring the bridges between the L2 to Bitcoin and Cardano are safe?

Sundial is an L2, it settles to the Cardano L1, which is how the transfers between Cardano and Sundial work. The Cardano L1 is where the L2 fraud proofs are submitted.

Sundial connects to Bitcoin using a few trustless or 1-of-n trust assumption bridges (that's the BitVM trust assumption). The bridges that use BitVM have a similar system of fraud proving that it settles to the Bitcoin network for bridging fraud.

Check Point does active monitoring by inspecting transactions to identify malicious/fraudulent events. The plan is to allow users to opt-in to a service that identifies these transactions before they are submitted.

For the token that powers Sundial, will it be your very own wrapped BTC in a Cardano Native Token standard? Or do you have your own token?

Regarding the Checkpoint question (above), if users opt in for the service, do they need to provide sensitive person information?

Sundial won't have its own token, but we will have our own version of a unified BTC that is indeed a CNT. That will be step 1. It helps with pooling together liquidity across various versions of BTCs on Sundial/Cardano. In step 2 we'll aim to support native BTC on the Bitcoin network.

As for Check Point, this service will be almost exclusively used by companies and organisations. And yeah, we'll need to have company information provided. Individual users won't need to worry about any of this. It's an entirely separate channel.

When is the mainnet launch?

For L2 functionality we're aiming for mainnet launch in the first part of 2026. But we'll be launching products and features in advance of that (such as BTC staking, etc.), so expect early features in the coming months.

How is the yield generated for the BTC staking happening before the mainnet is launched?

We work together with major BTC yield partners (Solv, LTP, HexTrust, Cumberland, etc.) to offer a unified platform for BTC lending, market-neutral delta strategies, and more. We'll also be working with RealFi and others on yield-generating RWAs and stablecoins, plus partners in the Cardano ecosystem like Cswap who can help stake BTC to earn native CNTs from projects that are deepening their ties to Bitcoin. So it's a very comprehensive plan for multiple staking options.

Is there a lockup period, and do we have to send the BTC to a custodian or is it held in some kind of trustless smart contract controlled vault?

There are going to be a range of options for lockups. Including liquid options, and some more structured. We're going for the trustless smart contract controlled vault as the primary (or default) option. The idea is to give people choices.

How can we join your mission?

What’s the most exciting way your Cardano DeFi integration will enable us to earn Bitcoin and ADA rewards?

I'm excited about providing collateral for insurance. Insurance is one of those things that is very lucrative but hard to get involved with due to the legal and financial requirements. .

We also plan to have a collection of combined Defi strategies so you can set up a whole portfolio for yourself in 1 click.

Will you use @adahandle sub handles to track your different wallets like $reserves at Sundial?

Absolutely! We're already working closely with @adahandle. And we're fully committed to transparency, but a privacy component is to be expected.

What's the most-awaited feature/project that is still missing on Cardano for Sundial?

As far as Cardano features, lots of cool IOG work will be useful in the context of Sundial. Here's a few we have in mind, in order of importance.

Leios Blobs for Data Availability
Automated Formal Verification for cheaper, faster security guarantees
Localized Smart Contracts for compliance-gated yield opportunities
Cavefish Light Clients for mobile use and light Watcher clients

Will the token be POS or POW? Will there be a pre sale?

The only token is BTC so POW, but with staking for additional yield.

How do you plan to market sundial to the bitcoin community?

Some of our major advantages are:

we don't have a token - just BTC to empower BTC
we are using UTXOs to power the whole network (both plugging into mainnet Bitcoin and using the powers of eUTXOs under the hood)
we have a non-negotiable commitment to security
we're going out to every major Bitcoin event/conference around the world to shake hands and raise awareness that we're in this to empower the Bitcoin network and community.

Will sundial as a L2 be able to benefit from the privacity provided by midnight?

We're actually exploring this right now.

At minimum, whether it's done with Midnight or not, we absolutely will have ZK proving capability on Sundial, which will allow for the creation of privacy-preserving dapps.

Can Sundial benefit from hydra?

Sundial will absolutely benefit and make use of Hydra! We're already working with the guys over at @DeltaDeFi to empower high frequency trading on Sundial by use of a Sundial-version of Hydra. So it's scaling inside of scaling.

How might Sundial benefit IOG's RealFi project? Potentially, how much untapped value do you think can be brought on chain from businesses across the developing world?

Can you also answer the same question for the developed world?

We're already working with John O'Connor and the awesome team at @realfi_co (part of IOG's portfolio). They are working on some really cool yield-generation strategies that come from funding innovative projects in the developing world. It's really amazing stuff. The launch is still some months away.

In terms of opportunities and unlocking value... the numbers are potentially mind blowing - in both the developing world and in the developed world - but for different reasons. In the developing world these is a shortage of capital, as well as a desire to leapfrog over lackluster banking structures (banking the unbanked). Exposure to ADA, BTC and stablecoins as stores of value is also hugely important, as trust in local institutions is low. For the developed world the idea is to better optimise existing capital, and to disengage from traditional institutions which are growing more predatory (unbanking the banked). Much more can be done with Web3 empowered property rights, digital stores of value, digital record keeping, and so much more. So in terms of numbers we're looking at trillions of dollars of opportunity. In some places governments will support these developments, and in others they will resist it. But it's set to be an inevitable development of our digital economies.

When will the MVP be launched?

We'll have the L2 mainnet go live in the first part of 2026. But I'd like to see MVP at the end of this year. We'll have some products ready before than, but there are a lot of very cool moving pieces that are coming together.

Will you be able to use $ADA to acquire BTC to be used in the protocol? What wallets will be supported on the BTC and ADA? And is there a timeline?

Yes! You will be able to swap ADA and BTC on Sundial

We're working with as many wallets as possible to get them integrated. We've already announced a partnership with Vespr, and are talking with others as well.

We do have a roadmap on our site.

Will Sundial support Lace so it can be done all in one place?

Yes.