How does Sommelier work?

Strategy decisions are computed on its own Cosmos chain and relayed to Ethereum vaults for execution, enabling more responsive management than on-chain logic allows economically.

Can validators change what my vault does?

Within on-chain guardrails, yes. That governance layer is the main trust assumption and distinguishes it from vaults with fixed on-chain strategies.

What are Sommelier's fees?

Roughly 1–2% management plus around 10% performance, varying by vault.

Have Sommelier's strategies performed well?

Results have been mixed. Active management underperforms often, and the architecture does not change that.

Sommelier Review 2026: Off-Chain Strategy, On-Chain Execution

Name: Sommelier review
Item: Sommelier
Rating: 6.8
Author: OBOL

On-chain strategy logic is expensive to run and slow to react. Sommelier's answer is to compute decisions on a separate chain, where computation is cheap, and relay the resulting instructions to Ethereum vaults for execution.

What the architecture enables

Strategies that rebalance on shorter timeframes, respond to market conditions and implement logic too complex to run economically on Ethereum. Named strategy providers publish mandates, and the vaults execute what the chain's validators approve.

The trust assumption

Your vault's behaviour depends on a validator set reaching consensus on what it should do. That is a governance layer between you and your funds which pure on-chain vaults do not have. Sommelier documents this and constrains what strategies can do through on-chain guardrails, but the fundamental point stands: someone can change what your capital does without your action.

Performance and fees

Roughly 1–2% management plus 10% performance. Strategy results have been mixed, which is unsurprising — active management is difficult and most active managers underperform in any market.

Who should use it

Depositors who want actively managed strategies and accept validator governance over vault behaviour. Those who want strategy logic they can read and that cannot change should use a vault with immutable on-chain strategies.

#	Service	Best for	Cost	Score
1	Pendle	Fixing a yield rate or trading it separately	~3% of yield plus swap fees	8.6
2	Convex Finance	Boosted Curve yields without locking CRV	~17% of rewards	8.5
3	Morpho Vaults	Curated lending exposure with named risk managers	Performance fee set by each curator	8.4
4	Kamino Finance	Automated liquidity management on Solana	Performance fee varies by vault	8.1
5	Beefy Finance	Auto-compounding across many chains	~4.5% of harvested yield	8.0
6	Enzyme Finance	On-chain asset management with enforced mandates	Set by each vault manager	8.0
7	Yearn Finance	Battle-tested vaults with genuine strategy transparency	Typically 2% management, 10–20% performance	8.0
8	Aura Finance	Boosted Balancer yields	~19–25% of rewards	7.8
9	Idle Finance	Tranched risk exposure to lending yields	~10–15% performance fee	7.6
10	Gearbox Protocol	Leveraged farming with contained liquidation risk	Interest on borrowed leverage	7.5
11	Origin Protocol	Rebasing yield-bearing stablecoin and ETH tokens	~10–20% performance fee	7.4
12	Autofarm	Cheap compounding on BNB Chain and smaller networks	~3% of harvests	6.8
13	Sommelier	Off-chain strategy computation with on-chain execution	~1–2% management plus 10% performance	6.8
14	Vesper Finance	Simple set-and-forget pools	~2% management, 15% performance	6.5
15	Harvest Finance	Long-running auto-compounding on EVM chains	~30% performance fee	5.9

Service

Score

8.6

8.5

8.4

8.1

8.0