# Sommelier partners with Mysten Labs to launch Cosmos smart contracts

Sommelier, a co-processing protocol to the Ethereum Virtual Machine, or EVM, has today announced a research and development partnership with Mysten Labs to increase liquidity transaction speeds and launch smart contract applications on the Cosmos blockchain.

Founded in 2020 by Zaki Manian, a core developer on the Cosmos protocol, Sommelier is a test-net protocol designed to deliver enterprise-grade automated financial transactions such as limit orders, batched orders and portfolio rebalancing to decentralized finance, or DeFi, traders and liquidity providers, or LPs.

The blockchain, which combines the Tendermint consensus layer, Cosmos Stargate SDK, and dual-way Ethereum bridge, will work with Mysten to implement Move smart contract programming to provide the entire ecosystem of Cosmos developers, as well as those on its Ethereum Gravity Bridge, with smart contract capabilities.

Mysten Labs is a Web 3.0 infrastructure platform founded this year by a team of cryptographical programme engineers responsible for the blockchain architecture of Facebook’s crypto-payments platform Diem and its respective mobile wallet Novi.

Mysten’s experience in the field will reportedly support the scaling of the Sommelier blockchain to 100,000 transactions per second, or TPS.

Related: Data shows parabolic-style growth in layer-two-based DeFi and DEX platforms

Sommelier co-founder Zaki Manian commented on the positive impact of the partnership:

“What we are doing with this partnership is completing the work of unleashing Tendermint’s potential to be the fastest blockchain network in datacenter class environments.

We are excited to partner with the best expertise from Facebook’s former team of leading cryptography and distributed computing engineers who brought Diem and Novi to life.”