No.271
Meteora MET
Solana's liquidity engine
🎭 The quiet machinist of Solana's swap pools, reshaping its price bins every block so the next trade barely feels the bump.
💬 “I don't move the price. I just stand under your trade. Tell me what you want to swap and I'll slide my bins right where you're crossing, so you pass through with barely a ripple. I have done this since the day I stopped being Mercurial.”
- Meteora is a liquidity protocol that runs on Solana, the plumbing behind token swaps and pools, not a blockchain of its own.
- Its big idea, DLMM, packs liquidity into narrow price 'bins' and nudges fees up when markets get rough, so trades slip less.
- It began life in 2021 as Mercurial Finance (MER), then rebuilt as Meteora in 2023.
- MET launched October 2025 with a fixed supply of 1 billion, used for governance and rewards.
📖 The Story
2021. On Solana, a team shipped a project called Mercurial Finance, ticker MER. Its job was the unglamorous heart of any market: hold pools of tokens so other people could trade against them. It worked, it had a following, and then late in 2022 the FTX exchange collapsed and dragged a lot of Solana's reputation down with it.
February 2023. Rather than limp along under the old name, the same team did something cleaner. They rebuilt the project from the studs and called it Meteora, a fresh comet for a fresh start. The people who had held the old MER token weren't abandoned; a slice of the future supply was set aside to make them whole. The new build leaned on one sharp idea, a liquidity design they named DLMM, which we'll get to below.
February 2025. The good run hit a wall. Co-founder Ben Chow, who had also helped start the well-known Jupiter aggregator, became tangled in the LIBRA memecoin scandal and the insider-trading allegations around it. He denied any wrongdoing, but he resigned, and fellow co-founder Zhen Hoe Yong stepped up to lead the project forward.
October 2025. After years of running with no token of its own, Meteora finally launched MET. It was one of Solana's most-watched and most-argued-over launches that year, partly because nearly half the supply was already loose on day one. The comet had a coin at last.
📊 Stats
🧩 How it works
Meteora has no blockchain of its own. It is an app that runs on Solana, so Solana does the heavy lifting of confirming transactions while Meteora handles one specific job: the pools. Its signature engine is DLMM, short for Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker. A normal pool smears its money thinly across every price, most of which never trades. DLMM instead lets liquidity providers stack their money into narrow slots called 'bins', piled up right around the current price, and lets the fee climb when the market turns choppy. Traders then swap straight through that concentrated stack: more money where it's needed plus a smart fee means your trade slips less.
🌗 Light & Shadow
- A genuinely clever liquidity design. Packing money into bins makes pools capital-efficient, so traders get tighter prices for the same amount parked
- Real plumbing, not a slogan. It sits under a lot of Solana's swapping and token launches, so it earns fees from actual use
- The supply is capped at 1 billion MET, with no endless minting above that line (scarcity is fixed, unlike no-cap coins)
- Heavy unlocks ahead. Only about 48% circulated at launch; the team and ecosystem share (~18% + ~34%) drips out over roughly six years, which can weigh on the price
- A leadership shadow. Co-founder Ben Chow resigned in 2025 amid the LIBRA memecoin scandal (he denied involvement), a reputational dent the project is still living down
- It is a young token on a fast, crowded chain. Solana has rival liquidity venues, and MET has to keep proving its DLMM edge to keep the pools full
🧬 Evolution lineage
Meteora is not a hard fork of any chain. It is the same team's protocol, renamed and rebuilt: Mercurial Finance became Meteora. It lives on Solana as an SPL token, and shares a co-founder with Jupiter.
🧭 Meet other friends
❓ FAQ
- What is Meteora?
- It's a liquidity protocol that lives on the Solana blockchain. In plain terms, it runs the pools that let people swap tokens, and it tries to make those swaps cheaper and the pools more rewarding for the people who fill them. MET is its governance and rewards token, not a blockchain coin of its own.
- What is a DLMM 'bin'?
- DLMM stands for Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker. Instead of spreading money across every possible price, it stacks it into narrow price slots called 'bins', right where trading actually happens. That concentration means trades slip less, and the fee rises when the market gets choppy.
- Why did Meteora used to be called Mercurial?
- The same team launched Mercurial Finance (MER) on Solana in 2021. After the FTX exchange collapsed in late 2022, they rebuilt the project as Meteora in February 2023, calling it a clean start. The old MER holders were not left out; a slice of the MET supply was set aside to compensate them.
- Does MET ever get printed past 1 billion?
- No. The total supply is fixed at 1,000,000,000 MET, so there is no endless minting above that cap. The catch is timing: about 48% was already circulating at launch in October 2025, and the rest unlocks slowly over roughly six years, which can add selling pressure as it arrives.
⚠️ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only