Sommelier is a decentralized protocol that enables community members to automate DeFi investment management independently. How does it work? Community members can create Cellars that execute investment strategies through smart contracts. These Cellars are powered by data feed providers who send market data to produce yield. Both Cellar creators and data feed providers receive fees based on the yield generated by their respective Cellars.

What makes Sommelier unique? The Sommelier protocol allows for dynamic vaults that can update the Cellar position and manage user funds based on live-market data in a non-custodial way. Unlike other platforms with static strategies, Sommelier supports mid-frequency trading strategies that take live market data as input.

What is the technology behind Sommelier? Sommelier is a DeFi blockchain protocol built on the Cosmos SDK and a bi-directional Ethereum bridge. This setup acts as a co-processor to Ethereum, offloading calculations to a Cosmos chain.

What is $SOMM? $SOMM is the token used for transactions on the Sommelier protocol. It captures fee revenue generated by the system and incentivizes participants in the ecosystem to continue their roles and engage in protocol governance.

Sommelier is a non-custodial, cross-chain platform for executing intelligent DeFi vaults (Cellars). Community members can create Cellars that execute on an advanced DeFi position through smart contracts. Cellars are powered by Strategy Providers (SPs) who develop trading strategies and send the recommended actions to the Sommelier Validators to be executed on the Cellar with the intention of gaining yield.

Cellars can be strategies like: A portfolio of BTC and ETH that is rebalanced based on price trends that machine learning algorithms identify An NFT trading strategy that leverages Twitter sentiment around particular collections A strategy that hedges liquidity provision on DEXes

Sommelier employs a unique architecture consisting of the Sommelier Cosmos SDK blockchain, an off-chain execution environment that keeps strategies private while allowing them to leverage a wide variety of off-chain data modeling techniques, and one of the best performing ETH bridges. Strategy instructions are passed across this bridge to reposition assets in Cellars. This bridge is also being expanded to allow access to other chains (like Polygon, Avalanche, etc) so strategies are not tied to just high gas ETH markets.

Sommelier aggregates and batches transactions, thereby reducing gas fees, providing an attractive alternative to Ethereums high transaction costs. As for security, Sommelier uses a decentralized governance mechanism run by validators, ensuring state-of-the-art safety of user funds. Validators pass strategy instructions across the bridge, but users assets are never moved across it, instead being deployed directly into Cellars. Further, Cellars are non-custodial, meaning that users can withdraw their assets at any time, while strategy providers never have ownership of those assets.

SOMM is the native utility token that is used for:

Securing the proof of stake blockchainFees for processing transactionsRunning validator nodes on the network via staking SOMM tokensGovernance votes to determine which Cellars to admit for deployment on the platform and how network resources are allocated*Distributing a portion of the real yield that Cellars generate to stakers

Right now there are 500 million SOMM tokens that exist.

Sommelier launched its mainnet in September 2021 with 500 million SOMM tokens created at genesis. 30% of that supply is in the on-chain treasury--the community pool--20% are held by the Sommelier foundation, 30% are held by investors, and 20% by the team building Sommelier. Since launch, Sommelier has had zero inflation. This is because SOMM stakers can earn real yield from the performance of Cellars on the platform, which is intended to be a more sustainable incentive mechanism than inflationary staking rewards, with these platform fees growing linearly with the amount of liquidity in Cellars.

Sommelier was founded by the early Cosmos core contributors Zaki Manian, Kristi Põlsdam, Jack Zampolin, and Kevin Kennis. Zaki, who serves as CEO, has been a leading developer in the blockchain space since 2014, when he taught himself cryptography and began contributing to projects including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, and Tendermint. He helped build the Cosmos ecosystem, including launching the first public Cosmos testnet and served as director of Tendermint.

SOMM is available for trading on Osmosis (https://BYDFi.com/exchanges/osmosis/), and strategy tokens associated with Cellars will be available there as well as on DEXes like Uniswap.