Steward: Things You Need to Know About the Sommelier Network

As the Sommelier chain makes it to the mainnet, the protocol team is working to make sure users on the Sommelier network get real-time data from the market. Sommelier is a conglomerate of different integrations that make up the Sommelier network.

Let’s explore the different systems that make up the Sommelier network and how Steward fits in.

The Sommelier Network

The Sommelier network consists of different systems like Cellars, Steward, Sommelier chain, Strategy providers, etc. that make up an automated investing system. Let’s understand what these systems are and how they fit into the Sommelier network.

Cellars

Cellars are smart contracts that are designed to manage funds based on a particular investment strategy.

Steward

Steward is an application intended for developers and validators on the Sommelier network. It integrates the full functionality of gorc for operating as an orchestrator and relayer of Gravity bridge messages between the Ethereum and Cosmos chains.

Sommelier Chain

The Sommelier chain is a Cosmos SDK application chain. It is the core of Sommelier that makes decisions about whether to act on SP recommendations and executes Cellar functions. Transactions and function calls are only settled on-chain when the Validators reach consensus.

Strategy Providers

Strategy Providers (SPs) are users or organizations who provide recommended rebalance arguments based on price or other market data to the Sommelier validators in exchange for a fee. There can be multiple Strategy Providers per strategy, and Validators are responsible for deciding which one they pay in exchange for data.

How does Steward fit into this network and how do Validators decide which strategies they pay for?

Exploring Steward in Details

At the heart of every automated investing system is a feedback loop wherein changes in the market must be observed and investments rebalanced in response. Steward is the agent of Sommelier that closes this loop. It allows a Validator to vote to rebalance Cellar funds in response to a Strategy Provider’s recommendation based on market changes.

Steward runs on every Validator in the Sommelier Validator set. It runs a gRPC server to which Strategy Providers send recommendations as soon as market data becomes available. To provide data to Steward, an encrypted and authenticated gRPC connection must be established. This payload contains the target Cellar’s ID, and the recommended arguments for its rebalance function parameters.

When Steward receives a new recommendation, it submits a vote to rebalance the appropriate Cellar based on that data. If Validators reach a quorum, the process of rebalancing begins.

Since Sommelier is a Cosmos chain, in order to provide strategies on Ethereum it needs a way to bridge assets and logic calls. Steward integrates the full functionality of gorc for operating as an orchestrator and relayer of Gravity bridge messages between the Ethereum and Cosmos chains. Steward runs the Orchestrator, which handles relaying Cosmos transactions to Ethereum, and co-processing Ethereum transactions on Sommelier, via the Gravity bridge. Steward runs the Orchestrator so that Sommelier can manage Cellars on Ethereum.

Conclusion

Steward is built with the Abscissa, a microframework for building Rust applications. Configurations for Steward are set by users in a `config.toml` file. To understand how this works, take a look at the guide in Steward’s Readme or the Validator’s instructions.

To learn more about Sommelier, please visit https://sommelier.finance/

To use Sommelier, try the Pairings App at https://app.sommelier.finance/

To participate in the community, please join the Telegram group https://t.me/getsomm.

To follow the project on Github, please star the project https://github.com/PeggyJV/sommelier.