What is Meteora? Solana's liquidity pools, explained simply

Meteora in plain words

To swap one token for another on Solana, there has to be someone on the other side of the trade. A liquidity pool is that someone: a shared pot of two tokens that anyone can trade against. The people who fill the pot are liquidity providers (LPs), and they earn a share of every trade's fee.^[5] Meteora writes the programs that run these pools, and calls itself a liquidity layer for LPs, launchpads and token launches.^[1]

You don't have to visit Meteora to use it. Aggregators such as Jupiter search every market for the best price, and many of their trades pass through Meteora pools.^[6]

What Meteora offers

• For liquidity providers: DLMM pools, where you choose the price range your tokens cover, and DAMM v2 pools you can deposit into and leave. See DLMM vs DAMM v2.^[5]
• For token launches: a bonding curve used by launchpads, launch pools, and vaults that let early supporters buy first. See How token launches work.^[1]
• For developers: SDKs, free data APIs and tools for AI coding agents. See Building on Meteora.^[1]

How big it is

The TVL total also includes Meteora's legacy vaults. Numbers move every day; DefiLlama has the history.^[2]

How Meteora makes money

Meteora keeps a share of the trading fees its pools collect: 10% in a standard DLMM pool and 20% in most others. It holds that income in whatever tokens were traded.^[7] Over the 30 days to 28 Sep 2026, that came to $3.56 million.^[2] Meteora has also used treasury money to buy back its own token, MET.^[8]

A short history

Meteora began as Mercurial Finance, a Solana project known for stablecoin pools. After the FTX exchange collapsed in late 2022, Mercurial announced it would relaunch as Meteora with a new token for MER holders.^[3] One of its co-founders later wrote that Mercurial had leaned too heavily on short-term incentives.^[9]

• December 2023: DLMM enters beta; LP reward points start on 31 January 2024.^[10]
• 31 January 2024: Jupiter's JUP token launches; Meteora says it launched on a Meteora DLMM pool.^[11]
• May 2024: Alpha Vault launches as an anti-bot tool for launches.^[12]
• February 2025: after the LIBRA token's collapse, co-founder Ben Chow resigns; Is Meteora safe? covers what happened.^[13]
• April 2025: DAMM v2 launches.^[14]
• 23 October 2025: the MET token launches.^[4]
• July 2026: reward points end with Season 2, and MET staking begins.^[14]

Who runs it

Zhen, who leads Meteora today, writes that he joined Meow and Siong to build Mercurial, and Meow, who also founded Jupiter, calls himself a Meteora co-founder.^[9][13] In February 2025 Meow said Meteora had been operating as a separate entity from Jupiter for over a year.^[13] Zhen took over as lead in March 2025, and Meteora's 2025 annual report is signed by co-leads Zen and Soju.^[15][16] The app is operated by Meteora Nova Limited, and MET is issued by Meteora Comet Limited, a company in the British Virgin Islands.^[17][18]

Where to start

New to it all? Start with the basics at learn.stonkbuilder.com and our Solana beginner's guide, then What is DLMM? and How to check a token before you LP. When you're ready, How to add liquidity walks through a first position.