SIDAN Lab

Overview

SIDAN Lab is a Hong Kong software company that builds free tools for developers and takes on paid engineering work for other teams. Its transaction-building libraries handle a fiddly part of making an app work: assembling, signing, and checking the instructions an app sends to a blockchain, so a team does not have to write that plumbing itself¹. SIDAN Lab also runs developer events in Hong Kong and takes part in Cardano's on-chain voting.

The company's work centres on Cardano. It publishes its code in a public GitHub organisation². SIDAN Lab has taken developer-tool and community proposals to Project Catalyst, Cardano's community grant programme, in which ADA holders vote on which proposals receive funding³. SIDAN Lab is also a registered DRep, a delegated representative that ADA holders can hand their voting power to, and it publishes the principles it votes by alongside its voting record⁴. Intersect, the member-based organisation that stewards Cardano's development, lists SIDAN Lab as an enterprise member and an active governance contributor⁵.

Key Features

• Cardano libraries in the language your team already writes. SIDAN Lab maintains separate packages for Rust, Go, Python, and TypeScript, so a team can reach the blockchain from an existing codebase instead of adopting a new one².
• Permissively licensed code. The libraries behind SIDAN Lab's tooling, including its Rust transaction builder Whisky, carry the Apache 2.0 licence, which permits commercial use and modification^2,1.
• A test bench for on-chain code. Vodka helps developers write and test Aiken, a language for Cardano smart contracts, the programs that run on the network. It splits into Cocktail for on-chain checks and Mocktail for unit tests⁶.
• A voting record you can read before delegating. SIDAN Lab publishes written voting guidelines and a public record of votes it has cast, with written reasoning attached to part of that record, in the same public repository its on-chain DRep registration points to⁴.
• A Cardano developer scene in Hong Kong. SIDAN Lab organises meetups and community events for the region under the Waffle banner, work it has taken to Project Catalyst as a repeat funding proposal⁷.

What to Expect

The SIDAN Lab website reads as a company page rather than a product you sign up for. It sets out what the team builds, points at the libraries, and gives an address that teams use to ask about engineering work.

Developers get the most out of the GitHub organisation, where each library has its own issue tracker and most publish tagged releases. The libraries began as tools the team built to unblock the DeltaDeFi exchange and then released publicly, which is why they cover awkward, specific problems rather than beginner tutorials⁸. The licences are permissive, so a team can copy a library and maintain its own version if priorities diverge.

ADA holders interested in governance have a second way in. The DRep repository holds SIDAN Lab's voting guidelines alongside a per-proposal record of how it voted. Some of those votes carry a written rationale, so someone weighing up whether to delegate can read the reasoning behind some of them rather than just the tally. The pool the company once ran under the SIDAN ticker has been retired on-chain, so delegating to SIDAN Lab is a governance decision rather than a staking one⁹.

SIDAN Lab runs meetups locally and announces them through its X account.