What is a validator?

Validators operate the Cosmos SDK-based nodes that allow the Sommelier chain to reach consensus and process transactions. Stakers of SOMM delegate their tokens to validators in order to secure the network and receive staking rewards proportional to their delegation, minus the validator’s commission.

Sommelier validators must also run additional pieces of infrastructure in order to enable the protocol to process cross-chain transactions and to receive instructions from strategy providers. Currently, only Ethereum is supported as a cellar environment. This means that in addition to their Sommelier node, the following processes must be running:

• Steward A server responsible for receiving cellar updates from strategy providers, verifying their authenticity and validity, and voting on chain with these updates to reach consensus to update a cellar. Validators are not responsible for making qualitative judgments about individual updates from strategy providers, though they will have mechanisms for disabling a strategy provider that is misbehaving.
• Gravity Bridge orchestrator A ****sidecar process responsible for coordinating and reaching consensus on what actions Sommelier must execute against the Gravity Bridge contract running on Ethereum. Additionally, the orchestrator observes events emitted from the Gravity Bridge contract and verifies their completion. It should be noted that this bridge should not be confused with the independent Gravity Bridge chain; we maintain and operate a fork of that codebase that has diverged significantly and our specific deployment of this bridge is only intended to support functionality for Sommelier.
• Gravity Bridge relayer A ****sidecar process responsible for observing Sommelier’s consensus on calls that must be made against the Gravity Bridge contract and actually executing the Ethereum contract call. The Gravity Bridge contract will verify the validity of relayed calls by inspecting the signatures attesting to consensus passed along in the contract call. Currently, running the relayer is optional, and only a select few validators are doing so. In the future, a leader election system will specify which validator is responsible for relaying and will likely be reimbursed for any spent ETH via a mechanism introduced in a later update.

What fees do I earn as a validator?

Within the Sommelier protocol, fees generated by cellars that are not otherwise directed to a cellar creator, strategy provider, or the community pool are paid to stakers. Validators earn a percentage of this staking payment depending on the commission they have set for their delegators.

How do I get started as a validator?

We are currently in the process of updating our GitHub documentation for onboarding new validators.

What to expect from the first cellar launch?

Validator PSA: Preparing for Cellars Upgrade

Sommelier Cork Pre-upgrade Call Overview