Sommelier's Path Forward: Embracing Revenue Over Narrative

Launch App

Sommelier's Path Forward: Embracing Revenue Over Narrative

We want to take a moment to reflect on Sommelier's journey, our current challenges, and our vision for the future.

Sommelier has always been at the forefront of DeFi innovation. We pioneered the concept of decentralized, market-adaptive vaults that dynamically rebalance, adjusting strategies in real-time. Our risk mitigation design for eliminating counterparty risk was ahead of its time when we launched three years ago and remains cutting-edge today.

In a landscape where high-risk, trust-dependent investments still dominate, Sommelier stands out by staying true to DeFi’s core promise: reducing the need for trust in financial interactions.

It’s obvious to us that in order to bring more mainstream users into DeFi, there cannot be the omnipresent risk of getting rugged. What we’ve built is a unique platform that allows any strategist to launch vaults and compete for capital, all while maintaining robust security measures and self-custody of assets.

However, the protocol faces challenges, particularly regarding the token's price.

Sommelier is part of an elite group in the DeFi space that actually generates revenue, alongside protocols like Maker, Aave, Lido, Curve, dYdX, and Uniswap. This puts us in good company and demonstrates the validity of our model. Nevertheless, our current revenue hasn't yet been sufficient to counteract the sell pressure resulting from a lack of strong narrative appeal.

In general, markets tend to trade on two things: profits and narratives. In crypto, the former is rare and the latter is rampant. Markets move on narrative. Look no further than memecoins. Unfortunately, Sommelier finds itself in a daunting place: the middle, with neither sufficient profits nor sufficiently bullish narrative. We recognize this issue and are actively working to address it.

The solution to our current challenges is clear: we need to significantly increase our revenue generation. We’re excited to share that we have a concrete, multi-faceted plan to do so. First, we're doubling down on our vision of Sommelier as a diverse marketplace for vault strategies. We're actively working to attract more strategists and expand our range of vault offerings, catering to a wider array of investor preferences and risk profiles. This makes it easy for anyone with alpha to design a strategy, deploy it on Sommelier, and make it available to the whole of DeFi.

A key part of this initiative is our recently announced Strategist Terminal. This desktop application serves as a command center for sending rebalances to strategies on the Sommelier platform. It's a user-friendly tool that's part of our broader push to make Sommelier more accessible for strategists who may not have expertise in full stack development. By lowering the barrier to entry, we're opening up our platform to a wider pool of talented strategists.

Additionally, we're exploring integrations with other DeFi applications as a white-labeled service. This move will allow us to tap into existing user bases and provide our advanced vault technology to platforms that may not have the resources or expertise to develop similar solutions in-house. These solutions would mean vaults powered by the Sommelier network would exist beyond the Sommelier front end app.

By executing on these strategies, we believe the liquidity for the Somm token produced by these activities will become a significant factor in the market. Through these efforts, we're not just growing our platform—we're making sophisticated DeFi strategies more accessible to a wider range of users.

The potential before us is immense. We're building an infrastructure that removes the burden of vetting individual strategists, allowing users to simply express their intent for yield and let our protocol handle the rest.

If we execute correctly on our growth strategies, Sommelier can become a foundational protocol democratizing access to the best of DeFi, generating substantial revenue, and justifying a much stronger valuation. This "if" is what drives us forward. It's why we're still here, still building, and haven't given up.

We're committed to realizing Sommelier's full potential and revolutionizing how people interact with DeFi.

-The Sommelier team