Meteora Town Hall 1 & 2 Summary — Lessons learnt and Meteora Transition

We held 2 town halls on 28/12/22 & 3/1/23, discussing The Meteora Plan. Our team learnt a lot of lessons while building Mercurial and applied them to Meteora. In the town halls, we shared these learnings as well as what to look out for, leading up to the launch.

Here’s a summary of what was discussed:

Lessons Learnt from Mercurial

1. Our community grew very fast from the start through the IEO process, but they were mostly after the token. One thing we would have done very differently is to start way before the token launch, to build a community and user base that understood our ethos and the project first.
2. In hindsight, it is important to understand that LM could be a potential way to grow, but can only be used in very specific markets and not as a catch up mechanism. During the Saber saga, we first started with a reasonable LM but when the competition became intense, we overdid it. Moving forward, we would not participate in an LM war.
3. In the early stages of Mercurial, right after the IEO, there was a lot of pressure to launch the token and catch the first Solana wave. That did not work out for us as we got caught beneath the waves instead by black-swan events that we could not control. In general, it is more important to listen to the community and shape up a token launch, than try to time the market based on external factors.
4. The original vision for Mercurial was dynamic vaults for stable assets, but we went further and built a dynamic yield layer to solve the capital inefficiency challenges faced by users, DApps, AMMs, etc. However this system requires a very robust lending landscape, and the lack of lending platforms has slowed down the growth tremendously. It is much better now, but the ecosystem still needs more time before it is able to fully support more advanced DeFi protocols.

How the lessons shaped Meteora

• The Meteora platform is valuable without LM.
  It provides value to users and developers through the lending aggregator and earns performance fees from profits. This is sustainable and creates long-term value and longevity for the project.
• Unambiguous clear tokenomics
  From Day 1, it is very clear that there will be 100M Meteora Tokens and 20% will be distributed to MER holders. In this revised setup, there won’t be monthly emissions, and for the current dual reward pools, only the partner side of LM will continue. After that, any decisions revolving around the token such as emissions or circulating supply will be decided by the DAO. It is a complete tokenomics revamp.
• Team-Community Synergy.
  Starting from these town halls, we want to make sure that we have a community that has clarity and completely understands our team ethos and product. We want to rope in the community to build the best and safest yield layer for Solana together.

Meteora Migration Discussion

• Snapshot of all $MER holdings is slated for mid-January 2023. After the snapshot, the current plan is that there will be a place for users to claim $MET when the token is launched.
• For the snapshot event, the ideal and safest solution is to withdraw all of the $MER tokens from the respective platforms and store them in your wallet.
• FTX: The 800K USD of hacked $MER tokens under FTX will NOT be considered as part of the migration process. Instead, the Meteora DAO will decide what to do with this in the future when the state of this clears up.

Ending thoughts: Meteora’s long-term goal is to become Solana’s decentralized yield layer for many users, protocols, and DApps.

Throughout all the ups and downs, the core team has not sold a single MER, remaining fully committed to the platform’s long-term success. We are here to build and hopefully, we can transcend into building a good community and an even greater product.

We look forward to working together with you to create a bright future for Meteora!