6 Core Principles of Sommelier

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6 Core Principles of Sommelier

We created Sommelier with a simple mission: to give everyone easy access to financial crypto products and services. Enabling people to use a broader range of options to handle their financial future.

Openness and inclusion have been the crypto movement's core values since the first bitcoin was mined. However, sometimes we lose track a bit and move away from these core principles of inclusion and openness. Sometimes, instead of opening up to "normies" as much as possible, we create products with overly complicated UI, use fancy terms to describe our services, and take other actions that enforce the notion of exclusivity rather than inclusion.

At Sommelier, however, we are building easy ways to help as many people as possible use the benefits offered by these emerging new asset classes (traditional cryptocurrencies, NFTS, tokenized stocks and bonds, etc.) to establish their financial independence, grow and preserve their wealth.

We are doing this leveraging 6 core principles:

First - Ease of use. We build our products with web2-like simplicity and familiarity in mind. All unnecessary complexity is abstracted away, exposing users to only core user product experiences providing real value.

Second - Empowerment. The Sommelier platform will host hundreds of portfolio management/trading/lending/staking strategies created by experts in crypto and traditional financial markets. The ability to buy into expert-prepared strategies enables anyone to quite literally use the intelligence of other people with years of experience instantly.

To double down on empowerment, we're also dropping our native term of Cellars (smart contracts that manage the portfolios while executing strategy instructions) and moving to Strategies. Plain and simple. What people are interested in is Strategies - leveraging the intelligence of others (+machine learning and algos) to manage their capital better - not underlying fancy smart contracts. Cellars are not going anywhere. It's just that people don't care what we call them. They are interested in Strategies powering them.

Third - Speed and precision. Differently from the TradFi markets, crypto never sleeps and never shuts down for the weekend. Therefore, no single person, especially one with little crypto background, can expect to respond to market changes in a proper time. With Sommelier, they can because all strategies available on our platform check market signals (both on-chain and off-chain) 24/7 and act on them anytime.

Fourth - Ease of access. It's fair to say that besides using DEXes, most retail crypto users have not interacted with smart contracts or deposited their capital to DeFi platforms. With the launch of upcoming strategies, we'll be introducing a new way to get exposure to dynamic crypto portfolio strategies. It's called strategy tokens. Tokens represent a share of a particular strategy portfolio. So users will have two options to engage - by buying strategy tokens from the platform (Depositing liquidity to strategies via Cellars - smart contracts) or by buying/selling strategy tokens directly on DEXes. You'll hear much more about the strategy tokens in the coming days and weeks.

Fifth - Transparency and security. Funds from each strategy portfolio are held in non-custodial smart contracts. Each smart contract, before deployed, is carefully audited by respected third-party auditors. This is why we have potentially slower delivery of strategies than we could have, although the pipeline of upcoming strategies is ever-growing. Every strategy provider must also provide extensive strategy backtesting information before even providing their strategy for a governance vote to be listed on the platform. We also made specific system architecture choices doubling down on decentralization (decentralized validator set confirming strategy instructions) and security (safe gravity bridge passing only strategy instructions, not the assets, fully non-custodial with portfolio capital of each strategy being held directly on Ethereum smart contracts).

Lastly - we’re building for everyone. Our team is highly diverse. We have people who're the most basic crypto users, people who were instrumental in developing some of the leading blockchains, we have total DeFi degens (in a good way, of course), expensive NFTs buyers, and those who don't like jpegs with the MONKE :) That's why we're not over-indexing on any particular user profile but are rather busy sourcing strategies for anyone - from DeFi degen-focused strategies for ETH accumulation and BTC-only portfolio management to smart staking strategies and anything in between.

The future is bright, and we're excited to bring it to you fast.

6 Core Principles of Sommelier

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