From Sunrise to Sunset: Shutting down Solana's Climate Staking Platform

tl;dr Sunrise will begin a staged shutdown starting March 2026. All funds are, and will remain, fully safe. See below for the details.

The climate crisis represents a challenge for humanity - to collaborate and coordinate at a global scale. When I started Sunrise Stake back in late 2022, it was with the idea that such global coordination needed a new technology layer - one that is decentralised and able to incentivise participants to unify to solve the crisis.

Sunrise started off as an experiment, to leverage the power of staking on Solana in order to allow people to use their on-chain wealth to passively offset their carbon emissions. The idea immediately attracted over a dozen volunteers, and in the exhilarating crucible of the 2023 Solana hackathons, we explored the seemingly boundless space of possibilities together at typical Solana speed. Within six months, on top of deploying the core platform to Solana Mainnet, the team of unpaid volunteers:

• developed permissionless connections to carbon-credit issuers, allowing funds to stream into reforestation and ecosystem protection projects without needing any intermediaries or brokers

• established relationships with four charities and collectives, allowing Sunrise users to donate to them directly via the app

• instituted a prototype social network of interconnected donors and recipients

• collaborated with Drip Haus to issue an NFT collection celebrating Earth Day, the first Drip collection that enabled tipping artists

• collaborated with Coinable to issue a pro-climate NFT collection on Solana, sponsoring Mangrove forest planting in Panama

• and collaborated with Crypto Girls Club and others to organise and host a female-led ReFi hackathon in Berlin.

Our activity caught the attention of the Solana Foundation, who supported us generously with a grant, and trusted Sunrise to facilitate the offsetting of the carbon used by the Solana network itself - its validator nodes and RPC servers, in order to reach the foundation's net-zero ambitions. By the end of 2025, Sunrise, through the support of the Foundation, and through the staking activities of the community, has been responsible for the offsetting of over 20 thousand tonnes of carbon - equivalent to the activities of a western household for two millenia.

That said, we have made the decision to start a staged shutdown of Sunrise activities. Reliable and diversified carbon credits have become harder to source, and regulatory, legal and tax overheads have made running this small volunteer organisation unfeasible. We are very proud of what we and the Solana community have achieved together, and it will be difficult to say goodbye, but now is the time to wind up this experiment and move on to new ones.

I would like to personally thank the incredible group of people that donated their time, expertise and energy over the last three years. Especially:

• Esther

• Jan Meyling

• Ronny Haase

• Juliane Veríssimo

• Marta Kotlarska

• Thomas Gehrmann

• Gigi Leung

as well as our most treasured partners and colleagues:

• Superteam Germany

• Solana ReFi

• ecoBridge

• Toucan

• Loompact

• Amira at the Solana Foundation

• Crypto Girls Club

• Pranav Khanna

• Marinade Finance

• Staking Facilities

Daniel Kelleher

Founder, Sunrise Stake

The Sunset - What will happen:

We are asking our users to withdraw your funds as soon as you can from app.sunrisestake.com. However, your funds are not going anywhere - if you saw this post late, your funds are still safe, and still available to withdraw.

Remember: If you have locked your funds into a Sunrise NFT, you need to unlock it first, then wait 2-3 days before unstaking.

The timeline for sundown is as follows:

• March 2026 - All new deposits are disabled

• March-June 2026 - Business as usual. Sunrise continues to direct staking yield to carbon projects as we wait for users to withdraw funds.

• June-December 2026 - Sunset mode. Any remaining yield collected will be directed to a wallet owned by the Solana ReFi community.

• 2027-2028 - Long-tail support. A cut-down version of the app will made available on a decentralised storage platform, and Github, for any remaining withdrawals. app.sunrisestake.com will be shut down.

Any questions should be directed to the Sunrise Discord, which will be monitored by the Sunrise team throughout 2026.