Meteora

Meteora inherited more than Mercurial Finance’s technology. Its Genesis Summary traces the predecessor’s 2021 SAFT financing and MER launch on FTX, followed by a post-collapse Phoenix Plan snapshot. The successor allocation reserved 20% of MET for that earlier community, including 5% withheld for FTX-affected retail holders pending checks and settlement. The new token therefore carried an unfinished distribution problem from the old project.

The liquidity tools also put Meteora close to controversial launches. LIBRA’s February 2025 collapse was followed by co-founder Ben Chow’s resignation and an announced independent investigation. Investors later alleged coordinated manipulation of M3M3 and LIBRA; Chow said his involvement was limited to technical support. The reviewed litigation materials do not establish a final fraud ruling. For Meteora, the dispute concerned how its launch machinery was used and who benefited, before MET itself began trading. Genesis later assigned M3M3 stakeholders 2% of total MET supply from the team’s original 20% allocation, leaving 18% for the team; it described this as recognition of Meteora’s role in attracting those holders.

The October launch used that machinery on Meteora’s own token. Its annual report records 380,250,599 MET distributed: 286,530,709 as direct claims and 93,719,890 through NFTs representing single-sided positions in a MET/USDC DAMM v2 pool. The pool opened at $0.50 per MET. About a quarter of the distributed tokens arrived already positioned to supply liquidity and earn fees, exposing recipients to market-making rather than just a balance in a wallet.

That realized distribution is a different measure from the 480 million described as circulating at TGE, which included reserved or not immediately claimable tokens. The legal white paper further complicates the comparison by stating 470 million and a different retained allocation and vesting schedule. Subsequent financial reports describe actual unlocks under the larger circulating model, but they do not erase the conflicting legal document.

On May 19, 2026, Meteora doubled standard DLMM’s protocol share from 5% to 10% of trading fees. LPs consequently kept 90% instead of 95%; traders’ total swap charge was not increased by that split. The team committed $500,000 to growth initiatives and argued that reinvestment could attract enough activity to benefit LPs. Its H1 report found retention broadly steady over six weeks, while explicitly acknowledging that the window could miss a slower departure of capital.

Treasury spending also included MET buybacks, whose execution deserves its own accounting. The Q1 report disclosed a $1.5 million loss in an attempted OTC buyback and said a police report was filed; that is the team’s account, not a finding of criminal liability. H1 reports $1 million of purchases in Q1 and none in Q2. At June 30, 38.8 million MET sat in the buyback wallet and its LP positions, more than the 36.0 million purchased since inception because positions also accumulated tokens. Those holdings reduced the project’s estimated trading float, without being the same thing as token burns.

July brought a more direct connection to MET. Season 2 became the final points season, with 20 million MET allocated to eligible LPs. A referral staking campaign began its first rewards cycle on July 21, paying USDC from DLMM protocol fees. It reserved one portion for stakers and another for the people bringing LPs into the product. This was an implemented, initially three-month experiment; the older white paper’s future engagement-point language no longer described the whole token experience.

The experiment asks participants to stay through a cycle and bring activity that actually produces eligible fees. Its referral capacity is a cap, not income created merely by locking more MET. August feedback exposed competition among users sharing a referrer’s cap and led the team to propose a different allocation. Meteora’s next test is consequently concrete: whether fee-funded referrals can retain productive liquidity after points have ended, and whether the rules and settled rewards remain understandable to the people supplying it.