The most controversial DEX on Solana, "Meteora," is about to have its TGE, and the founder has been accused of manipulating the meme market.

From the celebrated star project promoted by Jupiter to the scandal of manipulating meme tokens, Meteora has experienced a tumultuous development journey. (Background: A 10-fold big pump in two days, which might be the most abstract Perp DEX on Solana) (Context: The “invisible hand” of Perp DEX: How centralized capital manipulates decentralized markets?) The Solana DEX Meteora, which plans to officially launch the MET token on the 23rd of this month, announced its tokenomics during the National Day holiday and named the project “Phoenix Rebirth.” According to the MET tokenomics, 20% is allocated to Mercurial stakeholders; 15% is distributed to Meteora users through the LP incentive program; 2% is allocated to off-chain contributors, i.e., those who contribute to the development of Meteora; 3% is allocated to Launchpad and Launchpool ecosystems; 3% is allocated to Jupiter staking incentive programs; 3% is allocated to centralized exchanges, market makers, etc.; and 2% is allocated to M3M3 stakeholders. Additionally, 18% of the MET will be allocated to the team, and 34% of the MET will be reserved for Meteora, both of which will be unlocked linearly over 6 years. Overall, 48% of the tokens will be distributed and directly unlocked at TGE, but MET will not be distributed in the usual form of an Airdrop for users; instead, 10% of the tokens will be issued to users in the form of liquidity positions. According to Meteora, this mechanism allows the project team to avoid providing additional tokens for initial liquidity, while users can also earn fee income. Many people are unaware that Meteora's development has been quite tumultuous, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it is a “Phoenix Rebirth” for the project itself. To understand the story behind this, as well as what Mercurial and M3M3 are in the token distribution plan, we must start from the beginning. From “Prince Party” to “Prisoner” Mercurial Finance, the predecessor of Meteora, was established in 2021 and positioned as a stablecoin asset management protocol within the Solana ecosystem. It is worth mentioning that another protocol developed by the founding team of Mercurial is Jupiter, which is currently the absolute leader in the Solana DEX space. One of the co-founders of both is Ben Zhow, who has a background in product design and has been responsible for user experience and product development at two design consultancy firms, IDEO and AKQA. He later co-founded social applications Friended and WishWell. Another anonymous co-founder, known as meow, has served as an advisor for several DeFi/wallet projects such as Instadapp, Fluid, Kyber, and Blockfolio, and is an early contributor to the decentralized domain protocol Handshake. The core of Mercurial is to establish a platform focused on providing low slippage for on-chain stablecoin trading and high yields for Liquidity Providers (LPs). In terms of reducing slippage, Mercurial does not enforce a 1:1 token pair allocation when LPs provide liquidity; the flexible allocation options allow LPs to achieve arbitrage by adding unilateral liquidity after large trades, thereby reducing subsequent trading slippage. Additionally, Mercurial utilizes special pricing curves to concentrate liquidity within the desired range. If a user's trade exceeds the trading rate range, they will receive less liquidity support. In terms of increasing yields, Mercurial adopts a dynamic fee mechanism. In simple terms, when trading is active, Mercurial raises trading fees to reduce LP's Impermanent Loss; when trading is quiet, Mercurial lowers trading fees to stimulate trading. On the other hand, Mercurial will, after being approved by the DAO, deploy the assets in the pool to external protocols, such as lending, to further increase LP yields. In the hot DeFi market of 2021, protocols like Mercurial that aimed to become the Curve of Solana were highly sought after. It received early investments from Alameda Research, the Solana Ecosystem Fund, OKEx (now OKX), and Huobi, and also conducted an IEO on FTX. At that time, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried personally endorsed the project: “The team's strong technical, research, and operational capabilities prove the attractiveness of Solana. We look forward to working with them to enhance the liquidity and usability of the Solana platform.” In early August 2021, at the peak of Mercurial, its TVL accounted for nearly 10% of Solana's overall TVL. Even at the end of 2021, when Solana's TVL was nearly $10 billion, Mercurial's TVL still accounted for over 2%. Although it may not be considered a mainstay, it is undoubtedly one of the important DeFi infrastructures on Solana. The subsequent story is likely known to everyone, as the Solana ecosystem experienced a downturn in the bear market of 2022 and fell to an all-time low with the collapse of FTX. Mercurial also suffered greatly due to its close ties with FTX, with a significant drop in TVL that continued to languish. By October 2023, its TVL had fallen below $10 million, accounting for less than 5% of its peak. Similar stories have occurred with many now-defunct DeFi projects, but Mercurial's story did not end there. Transitioning to focus on DEX, it became famous due to TRUMP. On December 27, 2022, Mercurial released an article on Medium announcing the Meteora plan, which included launching Dynamic Vaults and AMM under the Meteora platform, introducing a new token to replace the original MER, completing a rebranding, and transitioning to Meteora.org. At that time, Mercurial focused on Dynamic Vaults, hoping to make Meteora a yield layer on Solana. In the team's vision, Meteora is a new platform composed of Dynamic Vaults, AMM pools, and guardians, with guardians responsible for monitoring and rebalancing the treasury assets of different lending protocols every few minutes, thereby providing LPs with the highest yields. In February 2023, the new platform Meteora was officially launched, but as mentioned earlier, the low point of TVL occurred in October of the same year, and Meteora did not emerge from the shadows just because it “changed its name.” After muddling through for 10 months, a turning point appeared at the end of 2023. In early December of that year, Meteora announced that it would launch in 2…