TLDR

• Sierra's core business has evolved into enterprise vaults. Neobank and wallet partners use the protocol to power their own yield products and asset issuer partners use us to deploy their own onchain vaults

• An institutional partner is taking a strategic position in SGT, joining Theia Investments as an early supporter. More details will follow

• The Summit Program ends on September 30, 2026. Final tally: 73,295,895 Peaks earned across nearly 2,500 participating wallets

• Peaks convert to Sierra Governance Token (SGT) allocations at TGE. Conversion details and claim window will be published prior to TGE

Enterprise ‘Vaults-as-a-Service’ Is Driving Sierra’s Growth

Sierra's core business has evolved into providing companies with access to stablecoin yield vaults that can be used to power permissionless yield, earn and investment products.

Our early thesis was that Sierra would be a unique protocol in DeFi by bringing novel assets and managed portfolios onchain, and that’s where our early focus began. And while the tremendous success we have seen with protocols like Pendle has proven this to be true, there has been an even stronger signal from the market where Sierra can provide more novel value to the industry. The explosion of interest on the B2B side of Sierra’s business, including dedicated RWA vaults, custom portfolios, and whitelabeled asset issuance, has clearly demonstrated true, scalable and sustainable demand for our infrastructure.

Since launching, Sierra has processed nearly $150M in transaction value, grown to $50M in TVL, has already paid out nearly $1M in yield to holders and powers the Earn products for companies with millions of users around the world. This is all bolstered by multiple audits from Spearbit Cantina, a long list of weekly third-party reserve verification reports from our FCA-regulated asset manager, and a track record of stability and success over the past 10 months, with an ever-growing roster of institutional partners building on our infrastructure.

Powering Our Partners’ Yield Products

Our Summit Program has been one of the most visible things Sierra has done publicly this year. Because of this, many likely see Sierra as a one-product protocol solely focused on the standard DeFi go-to-market playbook. While this is understandable, it is by no means the full picture of what Sierra has rapidly grown into.

Sierra Protocol is institutional-grade vault and asset infrastructure that is flexible enough to meet the intensive demands of business and enterprise clients worldwide. Sierra consists of audited contracts that govern vault and Liquid Vault Token (LVT) issuance, minting, redemption, yield accrual, NAV calculation, and cross-chain bridging, plus the legal and custody rails connecting instruments from 40+ financial institutions to global onchain capital.

SIERRA, the token most people know Sierra by, is just one vault that is built on the Sierra Protocol. It has served as the first-party reference implementation showcasing the Protocol’s capabilities, tailor-made for decentralized use cases. The recent launch of our new SPLUS takes this one step further, and showcases how the Sierra Protocol can and will be used to create stablecoin yield vaults that generate yield from unique, diversified portfolios of real-world financial assets. This provides any user with a wallet and stablecoins access to the same assets and professional active portfolio management that has historically only been accessible to institutional entities. But these two products are just narrow examples of what Sierra can do.

Sierra’s broader capabilities are what have gotten our partners most excited. A fintech with a user base and no yield engine can now take one of four paths: access our live flagship SIERRA or SPLUS vaults directly, deploy into other off-the-shelf permissionless single-asset vault options, access premium curated vaults managed by institutional asset managers, or have us curate and deploy a fully custom vault with its own reserve composition, rebalancing cadence, and multichain footprint. Yield sources, risk profile, branding, and redemption terms are all configurable, and the breadth of those options is easily the widest in the industry. 

As dollarization by stablecoins continues to accelerate around the world, so too does the need for high-quality, sustainable yield and investment products that are seamlessly interoperable with stablecoins. Sierra’s architecture is uniquely capable of serving this entire product suite, enabling businesses to drive growth through the industry’s most competitive yield products. Plenti is just one of many working examples leveraging Sierra. Plenti is a Colombian neobank, fresh off a Tether-led venture round, boasting 150,000 users with over $3B in transaction volume processed. This B2B and B2C company uses Sierra-powered vaults to provide RWA-backed yield on its treasury and customer deposits. There are many more partners live or currently integrating with Sierra, and we look forward to sharing more details as soon as we can.

That is the true shape of Sierra’s trajectory. Sierra is not looking to win a DeFi token war that is based on unsustainable incentives and inorganic, undifferentiated yields. Rather, we are rapidly becoming the layer powering companies that already have distribution, enabling partners to access the full range of custom, institutional-grade stablecoin native financial products that they can ship in weeks rather than build in years.

Institutional Custody and Reserve Management

Sierra’s capabilities can be understood as a non-custodial extension of OpenTrade’s battle-tested institutional platform, and legal and custody frameworks. Off-chain, the assets that generate yield for Sierra vaults all sit in a bankruptcy-remote structure combining our issuer of record with a dedicated Cayman segregated portfolio company. These assets are high-quality ‘real-world’ assets that are traded directly via a network of 40+ financial institutions, held in institutional custody with tier 1 banks.  All RWAs and RWA-based strategies are curated and operationally managed by OpenTrade’s asset management and advisory team, Five Sigma, an FCA-regulated asset manager with $5B under management that has structured over $500B in credit transactions and specializes in fixed income and credit portfolios. OpenTrade provides Sierra customers with bank-grade reserves management capabilities and the ability to seamlessly service both permissioned and permissionless/non-custodial use cases across the board.

Onchain, digital asset custody runs through Fireblocks, further secured by Station70’s disaster recovery systems, and Redstone provides Sierra’s onchain oracles. Compliance is ensured with Chainalysis’ jurisdiction and entity screening, and all contracts and integrations are monitored 24/7 with Hypernative. Put all together, no one else in the industry can match Sierra’s integrated asset reach, flexibility, and security capabilities.

Strategic Commitment to SGT

All of this has come without raising a single round of investment for Sierra. The goal has always been to push the limits in how far Sierra can grow as a protocol without taking outside capital. Quite simply, that limit has been hit and it is time to take Sierra to the next level.

An institutional partner is taking a strategic position in SGT and will contribute meaningful resources towards the further development of Sierra. As the legal terms and structure are being finalized at the time of writing, there will be a follow-up announcement that provides more details. What we can say: this is a long-term strategic commitment from an institution backed by some of the best investors in the world that we have spent many months building alongside, and we look forward to welcoming them and their investors as long-term aligned SGT holders and Protocol governance participants. 

This partner joins another that has built significant exposure to SGT and has long supported us as a partner in our growth. Theia Investments has rightfully earned its reputation as one of the top fundamental liquid funds in the industry with an unmatched track record of building alongside their portfolio teams. Their unique approach - a concentrated portfolio into which they heavily contribute their team’s time and resources - puts them at the top of the wishlist for any team building in this industry. We are proud and grateful for their early and continued support. 

These partners both serve as incredible validation of the Sierra Protocol and all that has been built so far, and will help Sierra mature into a next-level protocol built for the most demanding institutional use cases. We look forward to bringing on additional strategic partners that will contribute to building out the Sierra Protocol and its entire ecosystem over the coming years.   

Summit’s Conclusion and the Path to SGT

The Summit Program ran from November 2025 to September 2026. Over that period, nearly 2,500 wallets participated in a range of eligible activities and earned 73,295,895 out of a possible preset cap of 100,000,000 Peaks awarded for participation. As initially communicated, Peaks earned will convert to SGT allocations at TGE. The full 25M Peaks allocated to the current Pendle market (October 22 expiry) will continue to be issued through the end of the market; no other activities will earn Peaks as of 23:59 UTC September 30. The total Peaks count above is inclusive of the remaining Peaks still to be issued in the Pendle market. 

What was the Summit Program? It was our kickstart incentive campaign, designed to heavily reward people willing to show early support to an unproven protocol before there was a track record to back it up. When we first set out to design the Summit Program, we had a very clear vision in mind of transparency and fairness. As we outlined in our initial blog post, we took the novel approach of a fully transparent points program with a fixed time frame, fixed budget of Peaks and hugely generous allocation of SGT. There is always inherent risk in putting real capital in the hands of a new protocol, and for that we thank all Summit participants for putting their trust in Sierra.

With the conclusion of the Summit Program at the end of September 2026, our focus now shifts to continued expansion of the Sierra Protocol and maximizing the future utility of Sierra's governance token. SGT is and always will be the sole governance instrument of the Sierra Protocol. In fact, there is no equity in Sierra’s entity structure that could pose any conflicts with SGT. This is an intentional design and will never change. We anticipate a TGE of SGT in early 2027 and will provide more information closer to the date as we coordinate with exchanges, market makers and other key launch partners.

Practically, this also means the days of earning easy allocations to SGT are over. SGT's supply schedule is fixed, the Summit Program has ended, and any future distributions will run through dedicated incentive campaigns. Importantly, all Peaks earned to date will be maintained, with no dilution to the share earned by participants. To those who supported Sierra early: thank you, and congratulations, and we look forward to continuing building the Sierra ecosystem alongside you. 

As a token of gratitude for participating in the Summit Program, we are allocating 22.5% of the total SGT supply. Because only 73,295,895 Peaks were issued, all participants will end up earning proportionally more than they would have holding the same share of Peaks as if 100M total Peaks were issued and 30% of the total supply of SGT was allocated. 

There are several large announcements coming over the next few weeks and we are incredibly excited to share more soon.