After a year of building out, auditing and battle testing the new Meteora Platform, and several months of consulting with the community, team members and stakeholders on the Meteora Plan — The platform is finally live and the snapshot for the upcoming MET token has been taken, kickstarting a brand new era for the project.
Powered by Solana, the Meteora Platform is Defi’s most dynamic Vaults and AMMs, while the clean new community-first tokenomics aims to reset the foundation and drive a new wave of participants.
One of the core goals of the Meteora platform and token is to restore confidence and drive participation for Solana DeFi, particularly for the lending and stablecoin landscape, which has yet to recover from the events of the previous year.
In this post, we will recap the key elements of the platform, including the vision, the platform, the token, and community. We will also be doing a community call to run through the platform, what is being launched and next steps — Join us!
The Meteora Vision
Mercurial was one of the top DEXes in the Solana ecosystem, and established itself as one of the hubs of stablecoin liquidity, for both stable and pegged assets.
As reported by Coindesk, in the wake of the FTX and Alameda Research collapse, we embarked on the Meteora Plan to launch a brand new technology platform, and reset the existing Mercurial tokenomics by removing toxic stakeholders, creating a new foundation for participation to reignite user interest and grow market confidence in the platform.
There are 3 main objectives that we wish to achieve:
- Provide a safe, optimized and composable yield layer for users and developers.
- Become the capital allocation layer on Solana, consolidating and allocating liquidity efficiently to the best lending protocols.
- Build a community-driven capital layer to create an open, transparent and trusted system.
Each objective is motivated by important needs in the ecosystem:
- Users want products that emphasize safe, sustainable yields. Protocols wish to grow their liquidity without relying on LM. Developers long to build on easily composable infrastructure they can depend on in the long run.
- It is very challenging to optimize capital efficiently and safely across the different lending platforms. Assets kept on protocols, wallets and treasuries are generally unoptimized because of this.
- To put together a truly robust system, getting the community involved is critical. This will allow us to tap into the collective knowledge and experience base of everyone to create an evaluation system that is transparent, decentralized and trusted.
A stable, transparent and trusted lending ecosystem is vital for the Solana and DeFi ecosystem, as it forms the backbone for a blockchain’s health. By building a trustworthy capital layer for Solana, we will inadvertently attract more liquidity from and outside Solana — driving more liquidity to the key protocols in the ecosystem.
Platforms We Are Launching Today
In Meteora’s launch, we will see the introduction of 3 major platforms that users can immediately experience and participate in:
- Meteora Dynamic Vaults
DeFi’s first dynamic yield infrastructure, where the vaults rebalance every minute across lending platforms to find the best possible yield while prioritizing keeping user funds as accessible as possible.
Vaults are designed with safety mechanisms such as monitoring of utilization rates and reserve levels of lending pools, with the keeper ready to withdraw funds whenever the thresholds are reached. To bring safe and reliable yield for our users, we also have maximum allocation measures in place that assess parameters such as audit, open-source and insurance coverage of deposited funds of a lending platform to determine the maximum amount of funds that can be allocated to a protocol.
Users will be able to earn optimized lending interest when participating in the vaults while maintaining access to their liquidity. The vaults have been designed to be easily integrable through a straightforward SDK, forming a layer for anyone with passive liquidity to connect to.
Read the whitepaper for Meteora Dynamic Vaults here.
2. Meteora Dynamic AMMs
These dynamic AMMs are our first module built on top of the yield layer. Assets in the AMM pools will be deposited directly into the vaults in the yield layer and dynamically allocated to external lending protocols to generate yield and rewards, reducing the reliance on LM to attract liquidity.
LPs for these new AMMs will receive yield from multiple sources — the lending interest, AMM swap fees and LM incentives offered.
Meteora AMM pools will be the cornerstone in helping to further build up stable liquidity on Solana. We will be partnering with key stable liquidity partners and moving closer to our goal of being the main hub of stable liquidity on Solana.
3. Multi-Token Stable Pools
We developed Solana’s first multi-token stable vault under Mercurial, allowing for very efficient pooling of liquidity with multiple assets in a single pool. We were also the first to solve several key technical problems, including optimizing the stable algorithm for compute units to fit into the limitations of Solana.
We also developed Defi’s first non-pegged stable pools by leveraging an innovative mechanism that leverages on-chain oracles to maintain capital efficiency between 2 tokens in the pool, even as the value of one of the tokens increases over time.
Over the past year, these pools are now leading providers of stable liquidity in Solana, anchoring key pairs like allBridge, wormhole, stSOL with the native Solana and USDC tokens.
These pools and capabilities will be moved over to Meteora — continuing one of our core missions to be the key stable liquidity hub on Solana.
$MET
Our vision is for $MET to be a community token to revive confidence in Solana DeFi, starting with the various lending protocols. Backed by the Meteora platform, we believe the token will grow and gain value as the platform grows to become the capital allocation layer for Solana.
The MET token will be used as a governance token where holders will be able to come together to brainstorm, discuss and decide how to make Meteora one of the top projects in Solana and DeFi.
Commissions of the yield generated from dynamic vaults can be used to buy back MET tokens to either burn or deposit back to holders circulating supply.
Value accrual mechanisms will also be set in place to increase the value of MET tokens over time. We will work with the DAO on a proposal to set up MET staking to encourage MET holders to stake and earn more rewards.
Community Driven Tokenomics
20% of the tokens will be distributed to existing Mercurial stakeholders via the snapshot that was just taken, with 10% earmarked for contributor incentives to kickstart the DAO, and the rest for community initiatives.
This gives Meteora a clear path to being a community driven project, with most of the tokens slated for community ownership. There is no predetermined vesting or emissions. The new DAO will be formed early in the process and given control over the vast majority of the MET supply, so decisions on future emissions will be a fully transparent and well-informed process.
Snapshot Checking
We have taken a snapshot of the holdings of current MER holders.
To recap, there will be 100M Meteora tokens, out of which 20% (20M) will be circulating initially and distributed to MER stakeholders. We will be working closely with the community and the DAO to determine the best way to utilize and distribute any new tokens.
For the team, investors, and key partners, only 50% of the unvested token holding will be considered for MET allocation. After multiple rounds of consultation with our community, wallet accounts with any association with Alameda and FTX will be excluded from this allocation following their advice.
This is a significant step to remove all uncertainty about the ownership of the new platform and tokens, creating a new clear and transparent base for stakeholders.
The allocation formula is as follows:
For holders with unvested MER:
For others,
MER holders are able to check their MET allocation via this link: https://meteora.ag
The Meteora Community
Our community’s greater mission is to revive confidence in Solana’s DeFi, starting with the various lending protocols. We see the community driving the growth of the platform through contributing, developing, educating and evangelizing Meteora.
The community will be involved in helping to design the best capital allocation layer on Solana through collective critical decisions like LM allocations to pools, staking rewards, safety mechanism parameters, risk management and possible lending protocols to integrate. An important role in deciding how to attract and retain liquidity, including helping to determine what type of liquidity to attract and the incentives to deploy will be played by the community.
We aim to diversify the community stakeholders such that the DAO and treasury will be managed and governed by a myriad of people including power users, ecosystem leaders and advisors, lending protocol representatives to name a few, pooling together the collective knowledge and experience of everyone to truly make our project a decentralized, transparent and community driven one.
Kickstarting Meteora Awareness And Community
Before the token goes liquid, we think it is important to establish a community that can make key decisions about the capital allocation, and the growth of the platform, community and token.
Having a critical mass of people who understands Meteora and is invested in the project can help us gain valuable momentum in many ways. We envision this community of people to be made up of power users, ecosystem leaders and advisors, and lending protocol representatives to name a few.
Before the DAO is set up, we want to have three programs ready in order to grow the Meteora community.
- Establish MET incentives for people who contribute to Meteora in meaningful ways, including joining our community discussions, AMAs, or creating content to help educate the ecosystem.
- Identify and invite ecosystem leaders and protocol experts to be part of our set up. They will play an important part in advising the DAO on the key decisions to be made, along with advocating the protocol within the ecosystem.
- Grow awareness of the Meteora platform in the various lending community’s through a content and AMA program.
We will aim to make $MET liquid and officially form the DAO once these programs are underway and we’ve built a core community of contributors making progress growing Meteora and its mission to revive confidence in DeFi.
Forging Ahead Together
We are super grateful for this opportunity to reset on new foundations and build a project that allows our ethos, passion and commitment to building a truly beneficial tool for crypto to come through.
The Meteora launch is just the beginning of this journey together with everyone, and we cannot wait to see what the future holds for all of us.
Join us to build the best community driven yield allocation in DeFi, and discuss how we can rejuvenate growth and excitement for Solana DeFi. See you at our town halls!
