Takeru Shimojima brings extensive experience in business management and operational strategy to Sunrise. Before co-founding the project, he spent five years as COO and CFO at a blockchain startup, where he helped scale the business through multiple phases of growth. He also previously worked as a strategic consultant, leading the development of new business initiatives from the ground up.
Can you explain Proof of Liquidity in simple terms?
Traditional blockchain networks are secured through systems like Proof of Work (which relies on computing power) or Proof of Stake (where security comes from users locking up their coins).
Proof of Liquidity, developed by Berachain and adopted by Sunrise, takes a different approach by securing the network using liquidity placed in on-chain pools.
The idea is that instead of locking up one specific token to support the network, PoL spreads influence across many token pairs. This secures the system while strengthening the overall liquidity in the network.
What is Sunrise, and how does it enable cross-chain liquidity?
Sunrise is a new layer 1 blockchain designed around two main features: fast finality of data availability and a shared liquidity hub, both secured by Proof of Liquidity.
It allows sovereign rollups and leading L1s like Ethereum and Solana to connect
seamlessly through deep, shared liquidity via Sunrise.
In practice, this means that a rollup can use Sunrise to publish its data and still access a large pool of assets and trading activity.
Sunrise calls this “interliquidity”. It avoids the complexity of wrapped tokens and allows for fast, direct asset movement across different ecosystems.
What makes Sunrise different from other layer 1 networks?
Sunrise’s uniqueness comes from three interconnected features.
First, it uses a liquidity-backed consensus model. Every dollar added to the network’s liquidity pools also contributes to securing the blockchain. This design aligns market depth with network security, rather than forcing developers to prioritise one over the other.
Second, Sunrise introduces native fee abstraction. Users and applications can pay gas fees in any approved token. Behind the scenes, the protocol automatically swaps a portion of that token into $RISE, the network’s native asset, at the time of execution. This removes the need for projects to create or manage a separate token just to pay fees.
Lastly, Sunrise delivers fast off-chain data availability. Rather than storing large data files directly on-chain, it distributes them through a peer-to-peer network and secures a proof of that data on-chain.
Validators then verify only small, randomly sampled portions of the data against this proof, which allows the system to confirm availability in under 15 seconds , even during periods of high data volume.
Can you explain how Sunrise achieves this performance in simple terms?
Sunrise uses a few clever techniques:
First, when a project wants to publish data, it splits it into small, manageable chunks using erasure coding — some for the data itself, others as backup in case pieces are lost. Only a metadata URI pointing to these erasure-coded data shares is stored on-chain, not the full data.
Second, instead of burdening the main transaction pool, the actual data blobs are propagated and stored off-chain through a separate, peer-to-peer network. Validators don’t need to check every bit of data; they just verify a few random samples against the on-chain proof. If there’s anything wrong, anyone can challenge it with a small proof that shows the error, triggering penalties.
The result is a system that can process data availability with fast finality, allowing the chain to assure that light clients can verify data availability quickly and efficiently, even during periods of high data volume.
What does all this mean in terms of value for users and developers?
For users, Sunrise acts as a shared trading venue across blockchains. You can swap tokens from different ecosystems in a single step, because all the liquidity lives in one ecosystem. If you provide liquidity, you earn vRISE token, and voting power through Sunrise’s token system.
For developers, it solves two major problems: launching with limited liquidity and needing a separate token for transaction fees. Sunrise allows rollups to use their own tokens for gas, while the native token gains deep liquidity in Sunrise’s pools.
How do the $RISE and $vRISE tokens fit into the picture?
Sunrise uses a dual-token system consisting of $RISE and $vRISE, which are closely tied to its security, incentives, and governance model.
$RISE is the tradable utility token of the network. It is used to pay transaction fees, serves as the base asset in Sunrise’s liquidity pools, and can be staked just to earn rewards. Importantly, 50% of all $RISE used for gas fees is permanently burned, gradually reducing its supply over time and introducing a deflationary element to the ecosystem.
$vRISE is a non-transferable governance token. It can only be earned by providing liquidity to Sunrise pools, effectively tying governance participation to actual network usage. The more liquidity someone provides, the more $vRISE they can mint.
$vRISE stakers can also vote on gauge weights, which determine how future token emissions are allocated across liquidity pools. Although it cannot be bought or sold, $vRISE can be staked to earn $RISE rewards and can also be burned one-to-one to redeem $RISE, though the reverse is not possible.
This system ensures that network security, usability, and governance are all interconnected, with both tokens reinforcing the economic activity Sunrise is designed to support.
What is the long-term vision for Sunrise?
The goal is to empower developers with the tools to build the next generation of web applications, focusing on two core principles: liquidity and sovereignty.
By giving developers more control over how they launch and grow their projects, without needing to reinvent infrastructure, Sunrise hopes to become a foundational layer for an open, interconnected web3 ecosystem.