Meteora

Meteora is a crypto exchange and liquidity protocol on Solana. It is not the Greek monasteries or the Linkin Park album. People use Meteora to swap tokens, to earn fees by adding liquidity to pools, and to launch new tokens. Its best-known product is DLMM. This pool sorts money into price "bins" and charges more when prices move fast. Meteora also runs DAMM v2 pools, a launch tool called the Dynamic Bonding Curve, and its own MET token. Apps such as Jupiter JUP$0.260+4.6% send swaps through Meteora pools, so many traders use it without ever visiting its site.

How Meteora DLMM works: price bins and dynamic fees

Meteora's DLMM (Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker) splits a pool's liquidity into bins. Each bin holds liquidity at a single price. Trades fill against the active bin, and the price only moves when that bin runs out and trading steps to the next one. You choose which bins your liquidity covers, so your money only works in the price range you pick.

The fee has two parts, according to Meteora's DLMM docs. A base fee applies to every swap. A variable fee rises when trades cross many bins quickly, then cools as the market calms. That means you earn more in the moments when price swings put your position most at risk.

Each pool has a "bin step", the gap between one bin's price and the next, of up to 400 basis points (4%). Small steps suit stable pairs and large steps suit volatile tokens. When you add liquidity, you pick one of three shapes:

• Spot spreads liquidity evenly across your range.
• Curve stacks more of it near the current price.
• Bid-Ask puts more at the edges of the range, which suits volatile markets or buying in steps.

DLMM also accepts single-sided deposits (only one of the two tokens), and its limit orders turn chosen bins into on-chain buy or sell orders. Positions can span up to 1,400 bins.

Meteora DLMM Pro: configurable launch markets

DLMM Pro is a new version of DLMM for token launches. Meteora opened a waitlist for it in October 2026. A token team can choose where the first liquidity sits and how the market opens. It can also set fees that ease as the market matures. Meteora said DLMM Pro takes the best ideas from DLMM, DAMM v2 and its bonding curve.

The big change is that a project can launch and keep trading in the same pool. It no longer has to move liquidity to a new pool after launch. Crypto Briefing reported that each LP position is its own NFT. It also said the rollout is staged, so most teams get access through the waitlist rather than straight away.

DAMM v2 pools and Meteora's anti-sniper fees

DAMM v2 is Meteora's constant-product pool, the classic AMM design where liquidity covers every price. It is where tokens from Meteora's bonding curve go when they graduate. You can keep liquidity full-range, or set a fixed price range for more fee income per dollar. Each position is an NFT, so it can be split, sent, or locked while it keeps earning fees.

The fee settings are built for launches, per the DAMM v2 docs. A pool creator can start fees high and lower them over time, or as the token's market cap grows. This makes bots pay heavily to buy in the first seconds of trading. An optional dynamic fee also rises with volatility.

A "compounding" mode puts part of the fees back into the pool. Locked liquidity, a common way for teams to show they cannot pull the pool, still earns fees.

Launching a token on Meteora: Dynamic Bonding Curve, Alpha Vault and Presale Vault

Meteora's Dynamic Bonding Curve (DBC) sells a new token along a price curve. The price goes up as people buy. Once buyers have paid in enough SOL or USDC, the token "graduates". Its liquidity then moves into a DAMM v2 pool for normal trading, per the DBC docs.

DBC is built for launchpads as well as single projects. A launchpad can reuse one setup for many tokens. It can shape the price curve and split trading fees with each token's creator. In 2026, builders also used DBC for tokenized stocks and other real-world assets:

• Since September 2026, launches can be paired with Backpack-issued tokenized stocks from Backpack.
• Since 22 October 2026, DBC tokens can carry transfer fees paid out to holders.
• Metaplex MPLX$0.082-3.8% named Meteora a partner for MPL-3643, so pools can be created for permissioned real-world-asset tokens.

Two vaults handle the sale before trading opens. Alpha Vault collects deposits and buys during a protected window ahead of public trading, to keep bots out. Presale Vault runs fixed-price, first-come or pro-rata presales, with whitelists and tiers.

Meteora fees: what LPs keep and what the protocol takes

Liquidity providers (LPs) on Meteora keep most of the trading fees. The protocol takes a fixed share, set out on Meteora's protocol revenue page. In normal DLMM pools that share is 10%. Most other pools pay the protocol twice that, as the table shows. The fee a trader pays is set pool by pool, so check it before you deposit.

At its August 2026 community call, Meteora said its LPs earned $140 million in fees in the first half of 2026, on about $32 billion of trading.

You can see live volume, fees and deposits in the data widgets on this page.

MET token: supply, vesting and Referral Staking

MET is Meteora's own token. It launched in October 2025 with a fixed supply of 1 billion. Just under half of that supply was unlocked on day one, per the MET tokenomics page. Team tokens unlock slowly over six years, ending in 2031. The real MET mint address starts with "METvsv".

The biggest single share is the Meteora Reserve, at about a third of supply. Former Mercurial token holders and the LP rewards plan got 15% each. The team also burned about 2.3 million MET two days after launch.

The main way to earn with MET is Referral Staking, which launched in July 2026. You stake MET and earn USDC, paid from DLMM protocol fees. You earn extra for bringing in new LPs. After three rounds, Meteora said in a forum update that it had paid out more than $1.9 million in USDC.

From the fourth round, you must also earn at least $10 in fees from LP positions opened during that round before you can claim. Meteora also said it would add a one-step option to turn USDC rewards straight into staked MET. Meteora posts changes like these on its proposals forum.

Meteora airdrop: LP Stimulus Plan and Expert Contributors

Meteora hands out MET to people who add liquidity, through its LP Stimulus Plan. The plan runs in seasons. The second season rewarded about a year of liquidity, and its claim window closed on 21 October 2026.

Meteora then opened a checker for Expert Contributors. These are the teachers, builders and LPs the team says helped Meteora grow that season. The pot is 6 million MET. To claim a share, you must link a Solana wallet before the end of 2026. Claim only through the official meteora.ag site. Fake airdrop pages often appear around token claims.

Who should use Meteora

Meteora suits active LPs on Solana who will pick a price range and keep an eye on it. It also suits token teams and launchpads that want the sale, presale and trading in one place. It is a poor fit if you want to deposit and forget. A position stops earning once the price leaves your range. Many Meteora pools also hold new tokens whose prices swing hard.

If you only swap, you may use Meteora through Jupiter without knowing it. Jupiter sends each trade to the pool with the best price. If you build apps, Meteora offers code kits for TypeScript, Rust and Go, data APIs and a launchpad template. You can find them on its GitHub and in its docs.

Is Meteora safe? Audits, upgrade keys and LP risks

Meteora's main programs have been audited many times, version by version. The audits check the code. They do not vet the tokens in its pools or protect you from losses on a bad trade. The audit index lists each report by program:

• DLMM: Offside Labs, OtterSec, Zenith, Sherlock and Sec3, across versions 0.8 to 0.13.
• DAMM v2: Zenith, Offside Labs and OtterSec, up to version 0.2.5.
• Dynamic Bonding Curve: Offside Labs, OtterSec and Zenith, up to version 0.2.2.

Alpha Vault, Presale Vault, Zap, fee sharing and Referral Staking have their own audit pages. A bug bounty runs through OOO Security.

Meteora's docs do not say who can upgrade its programs. We could not confirm the upgrade authority of the DLMM program (LBUZKhRxPF3XUpBCjp4YzTKgLccjZhTSDM9YuVaPwxo) on-chain when we updated this profile. If the authority is a single key, the team could change the code under your deposit. You can check the program on a Solana explorer before you commit a large amount.

The bigger risks are in how you use it:

• Impermanent loss: if one token in your pair falls sharply, you end up holding more of it. The volatility fee softens this but does not remove it.
• New tokens: many pools trade fresh memecoins that can lose most of their value in hours. Meteora's own safety guide points users to Rugcheck and Jupiter's token checks.
• Legacy vaults: Dynamic Vault, which lends out idle deposits, is now a legacy product. An off-chain operator moves its funds into approved lending strategies, with Jupiter's JupLend as the active one, so you also rely on that lender.

The LIBRA lawsuit and Ben Chow's exit

Meteora co-founder Ben Chow resigned in February 2025, after questions about his role in the launch of LIBRA. LIBRA was a memecoin that Argentina's president, Javier Milei, had promoted, and its price crashed soon after launch. Investors then filed a US class action against Meteora, Chow and Kelsier Ventures, the firm that advised on the launch. The suit alleged that LIBRA and the M3M3 token were part of a memecoin scheme. The defendants asked the court to dismiss it.

On 29 September 2026, Judge Jennifer L. Rochon of the federal court in Manhattan (the Southern District of New York) dismissed the case with prejudice and denied leave to amend. She found the plaintiffs had not adequately alleged that Meteora was an association that could be sued. She also found they had not plausibly shown that Chow intended to take part in the alleged fraud. The judge refused, too, a request to add claims about the MELANIA, ENRON and TRUST tokens, as our report on the ruling explains. The court made no finding that the alleged scheme did or did not happen.

Since Chow left, co-founder Zhen Hoe Yong (known as Zen) has led Meteora, per SolanaFloor. He now runs it with co-lead Soju.

Meteora vs Raydium and Orca, and other alternatives

Meteora suits LPs who want fine control over where their liquidity sits, and fees that rise when prices swing. Raydium and Orca are the other big Solana exchanges with ranged pools. They use a smooth price range, like Uniswap v3 on Ethereum. Meteora's DLMM uses separate price bins instead. For launches, Meteora's bonding curve competes with Raydium's LaunchLab and with Pump.fun.

For a simple swap, the exchange matters less, because Jupiter compares prices across them. If you only need to create a token with a name and logo, Solana Compass runs its own token launch tool. It is our product. It makes the token but does not set up a bonding curve or a pool.

Meteora's history: from Mercurial Finance to Meteora

Meteora began in 2021 as Mercurial Finance, a Solana exchange for swapping stablecoins. Mercurial's token sale ran on FTX, so the exchange's collapse hit the project hard. A month later, in December 2022, the team said it would relaunch as Meteora with a new token.

The MET launch finished that plan, and Mercurial holders got a share of the new token. The old Mercurial programs are no longer supported. Meteora's docs now list the first DAMM, Dynamic Vault and Stake2Earn as older "legacy" products. Stake2Earn is the fee-sharing tool once known as M3M3.

Our news on Meteora appears below this profile. It includes each round of Referral Staking, such as the second round's USDC payout.