Whitepaper - Sundial Protocol

Sundial Protocol: Architecture, Ledger Rules, and Implementation (version 1.0, 25 September 2026) is the full specification of the Sundial L2.

Read the whitepaper

sundialprotocol.com/resources/whitepaper

It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The authors are Vic Genin and Sam Delaney, with specification contributors from Anastasia Labs, Fluid Tokens, P2P-Defi, IOG and the Cardano Foundation, and formal verification by IOG.

What it covers

The whitepaper specifies the optimistic rollup. Bitcoin yield products that build on the ledger, such as Dawn and Solstice, are outside its scope and are documented under Products.

Part	Chapters	Contents
I. Protocol	1 to 7	Ledger state, user events, the consensus contracts, the proof protocol, the 21 ledger rules and their fraud proofs, data availability, phase two validation
II. Implementation	8 to 15	The node: architecture, transaction ingress, the rule engine, block production, the data model, the SDK and the HTTP API
III. Operations	16 to 20	Deployment, service objectives, measured performance, security, verification and testing
Appendices	A to G	On-chain data structures, protocol parameters, reject codes, glossary, networks

Reading guide

Protocol designers and auditors: Part I, then chapters 19 and 20. Start with chapters 3 and 5.
Integrators: the introduction, then chapters 2, 8, 10 and 15, and section 19.6.
Node operators: chapters 8 to 13 and Part III.

How these docs relate to it

The Sundial L2 section of these docs summarizes the whitepaper chapter by chapter. Where the two differ, the whitepaper is authoritative.

Docs page	Whitepaper
Overview	Executive summary, introduction
Ledger and transactions	Chapter 1
Deposits, withdrawals and transaction orders	Chapter 2
Consensus	Chapter 3
Fraud proofs and ledger rules	Chapters 4 and 5
Data availability	Chapter 6
Performance	Chapter 18
Security model	Chapter 19
Protocol parameters	Appendix C
Reject codes	Appendix D

Source material

The whitepaper’s sources are public:

Specification, formal models and code: sundial-protocol/sundial-monorepo
Supporting operational documents: sundial-protocol/internal-docs

Read the whitepaper

​What it covers

​Reading guide

​How these docs relate to it

​Source material

What it covers

Reading guide

How these docs relate to it

Source material