Sundae Labs

Overview

Sundae Labs is a software development studio that builds blockchain products and takes on engineering work for other teams. It writes budget administration software, a debugger for on-chain code, and a settlement protocol that other applications can run on top of. It launched SundaeSwap, a token exchange on Cardano, in January 2022¹.

Most of that work lands on Cardano. Sundae Labs wrote both the on-chain contracts and the administration console for Intersect's treasury management tooling, with Xerberus supplying the public financial dashboard beside it². Project Catalyst, Cardano's community funding program, has separately funded the studio to contract a Rust developer for Amaru, a ground-up rewrite of the software that runs the Cardano network³. On Midnight, a privacy-focused network, Sundae Labs builds Capacity Exchange, a service that lets users pay for Midnight transactions without holding any DUST, the unit those transactions are paid in⁴, with its client and server code published openly⁵.

Key Features

• Public budgets that leave a trail. Treasury Admin splits a budget into vendor milestones and makes a set number of committee members co-sign before funds move, recording each funding, disbursement, and withdrawal on-chain⁶. Milestone payments can be paused when a vendor does not deliver⁷.
• See exactly where a contract went wrong. Gastronomy loads a real transaction and steps through each script in it, forwards or backwards, with the context the chain gave it. Through a fork of the Aiken compiler that the team shares in Discord, each step also reads against the Aiken code that produced it⁸.
• Audit reports published beside the code. Intersect names TxPipe and MLabs as the auditors of the treasury contracts², and both reports sit in the same public repository as the contract source⁹.
• Pieces other Cardano teams reuse. Sundae Labs publishes Go clients for Kupo and Ogmios, two services applications use to read the chain, plus React components for wallet connection¹⁰. A TypeScript package for working with the treasury contracts ships to the public package registry¹¹.
• Sequencing kept apart from custody. Gummiworm, the settlement protocol that the studio's private order-book exchange Sugar Rush runs on, gives the small group that orders transactions no key that can release funds¹². A larger group of signers has to co-sign anything that moves money on the main chain¹³.

What to Expect

The Treasury page puts a walkthrough request next to a link to the source code⁶, and the Gastronomy page welcomes issues and pull requests on its GitHub repository⁸. The contact page lists enquiry categories for a new project, a product question, or a partnership¹⁴.

Developers get the most from a visit. The Gastronomy page links straight to its repository, and the studio's GitHub organization holds public repositories written in Rust, Go, TypeScript, and Aiken, one of the languages used for Cardano's on-chain code¹⁵.

Sundae Labs files its Project Catalyst work under one public proposer profile, where each proposal shows whether it was funded, completed, or still running¹⁶. Gastronomy came through that route, funded to pair the debugger with Aiken and closed out with a published report¹⁷.