Sommelier Review

How Sommelier scores in yield aggregators

Sommelier, now branded Somm, runs ERC-4626 vaults called cellars whose positions are changed by strategists, with every change approved by the validator set of Sommelier's own Cosmos SDK chain. This entry rates those cellars in our yield aggregator ranking. The basis is desk research of somm.finance, its audits and bug bounty pages, the Sommelier documentation and the PeggyJV GitHub repositories, checked on November 6, 2026. No deposit was made. The category uses five criteria, each marked 0 to 10 and weighted equally, as set out in our ratings methodology.

The overall score is the plain average: (6 + 10 + 6 + 7 + 4) / 5 = 33 / 5 = 6.6. The previous overall was 4.6.

Three marks changed at this check. Audit disclosure rose from 2 to 6: the earlier review could not reach an official audit page, and somm.finance now publishes one with linked reports. Custody & control rose from 3 to 7 because the homepage states the withdrawal rule that the earlier review did not find. Licence & code openness rose from 8 to 10 after we confirmed Apache 2.0 files across all four core repositories, the same band the category gives to MIT and AGPL code.

Strongest criteria: licence and custody design

Licence & code openness carries the full 10. The cellar contracts, the Steward relayer, the Gravity Bridge fork and the chain itself are all published by PeggyJV under Apache 2.0, and the contract files carry matching SPDX headers. That covers every layer a deposit passes through, not just the vault.

Custody & control scores 7. Sommelier states the rule plainly: users are the only ones who can withdraw, and validators can move assets only among a vault's prescribed positions. Changes run through validator consensus on the Sommelier chain rather than a multisig, and the governance overview says an emergency shutdown stops new deposits and adaptor calls but does not block withdrawals. The mark is not higher because control is still broad. A strategist decides where funds sit within the trusted adaptors, governance decides which adaptors and positions to trust, and the bridge that carries instructions is part of the trust model. Our guide to how blockchain bridges work explains that risk.

Weakest criteria: strategy detail, then fee figures

Strategy transparency at 4 is a measured deficiency. Real Yield ETH is described as leveraged staking on Aave and Compound plus Uniswap v3 liquidity for liquid staking tokens. Real Yield USD spans Aave, Compound and Uniswap v3. Real Yield BTC is described only as "a dynamic and evolving set of strategies". None of the pages read gives allocations, leverage levels, the basis of any displayed yield or past performance. The app pages did not render for our checks, so anything shown only there is not measured.

Fee disclosure at 6 rewards a clear structure without figures. The high-water mark means a performance fee applies only to gains above the previous peak share price, and fees are paid from a reserve rather than from active positions. But the documentation gives no rate for any cellar, no maximum, and no strategist share, which governance sets per cellar. A strategist can change the fees, with the change taking effect after the next fee accrual. Peers that publish figures score higher here.

Audit disclosure at 6 sits between the two. Coverage is broad, because every listed strategy links a report. Depth of disclosure is thin: the page names no firm in its text, dates almost nothing, and 31 strategies share eight Macro reports. The chain application and the Steward relayer appear in the bug bounty scope but not on the audits page.

What the score does not cover

• APY, TVL and returns, which change with each strategy.
• The safety of Aave, Compound, Uniswap and the other protocols a cellar uses, and liquidation risk on leveraged positions.
• Validator and bridge failure modes beyond what the docs state.
• Eligibility and liability: somm.finance lists a privacy policy but no terms of service.
• The SOMM token and staking rewards.

Sommelier vs Idle Finance and Harvest Finance

Idle Finance scores 6.8 and Harvest Finance 7.0, both ahead of Sommelier. Sommelier leads both on licence and custody, and trails both on fees, audits and strategy detail. Peer marks are as currently published and may change when those entries are rechecked.

Who it suits

The score suits a depositor who puts open code and a written withdrawal guarantee first, and who accepts strategist-run positions approved by a validator chain. It suits less well anyone who wants published fee rates, dated audits or an allocation breakdown before depositing. Read a cellar's fees and positions on-chain or in the app before committing funds.