When studying Meteora, the easiest mistake is to think of the word “fees” as a single thing. The fees traders pay can flow to people providing liquidity, partner entities, or the protocol itself; the revenue entering the protocol may then be used for development, subsidies, buybacks, or staking rewards. Only by breaking down where these funds go will the value link of $MET become concrete.

北京时间 2026 年 9 月 24 日 20:51:59.860, the Binance MET/USDT spot price is 0.3349 USDT, down 12.67% over the past 24 hours on a rolling basis, with trading volume of approximately 7.3834 million USDT.

This article studies Meteora, which corresponds to Binance’s listing announcement and is issued on Solana, to avoid confusion with similarly named code projects. Changes in market conditions are the starting point of the research; current evidence is insufficient to determine the direct trigger for this round of decline.

First, look at how this business charges

Meteora’s users are not just the ones who click the swap button; they also include LPs providing liquidity, and projects using its infrastructure to issue tokens. DLMM allows LPs to concentrate funds into discrete price ranges and adjust fees as prices move;

DAMM and DBC cover different types of pools and new token issuance processes.

You can think of it as a set of market-making tools. LPs take on inventory and price-movement risk, traders pay fees for execution, and the protocol receives a portion of the fees. High fees may come from active trading, or they may correspond to higher volatility and harder-to-manage positions. Counting all the money received by LPs as protocol revenue would overstate business scale;

If you then count it all as MET holders’ earnings, you take another step further.

This kind of distinction can also be seen in independent datasets. DeFiLlama’s current methodology separately records total swap fees, protocol net retention, and the portion earned by liquidity providers. In this read of its interface on September 24, Meteora’s protocol revenue intake over the past 30 days is about $3.3003 million.

It shows that the protocol has ongoing fee-generating activity; the statistics window, price conversions, and abnormal-pool filtering each follow their own rules, so they cannot directly replace accounting profit.

The buyback has already happened, but the strength is not a fixed commitment

In the official semiannual report, disclosed protocol revenue for H1 2026 is about $18.2 million. In the same period, all buybacks occurred in the first quarter: $1 million USDC was投入 to purchase about 7.007 million MET; there were no buybacks executed in the second quarter.

Here it should be stated accurately as “the executed buybacks disclosed by the official”; this time, the author did not independently reconstruct each trade’s market-maker buy-in flow.

This record is more substantive than “a buyback will be launched,” and it also suggests there is no direct equation that can be drawn between revenue growth and buyback intensity. The protocol has revenue, but it does not mean it will buy tokens every month at the same ratio. Researchers should continue tracking clear budget rules and actual execution, rather than extrapolating the whole year from a single buyback.

The semiannual report also distinguishes between the number of purchases and the number of tokens held in wallets with LP positions: LP positions accumulate tokens over time due to fees and price changes. Therefore, an increase in the buyback wallet balance should not be entirely explained as additional cash purchases. Tokens kept in a dedicated wallet after the buyback also cannot be directly written as “burning”; the supply cap decreasing requires other evidence of burning.

In July, there appeared a more direct linkage to holding tokens

The Referral Staking plan announced in July uses a portion of the DLMM protocol fees for MET staking and referral rewards. According to the official rules, the staking reward pool receives 10% of the DLMM protocol fees, and another 10% is used for referral-related rewards, with rewards paid out in USDC. The initial plan was to run for three months, and the next stage would be decided based on the results.

The denominator of the proportion is crucial. If a transaction generates $100 in total fees and the protocol extracts $10 from it, then the amount used for the staking pool is 10% of that $10, i.e., $1. It is not 10% of the total transaction fees, nor 10% of all Meteora product revenue. Different products and different fee-allocation layers should not be mixed.

This gives MET specific participation conditions: the staking amount, the duration of holding, and whether cycle rules are satisfied will all affect allocations. Early unstaking could also cause the participant to lose the rewards accumulated for that cycle. Therefore, simply holding MET, participating in staking, and receiving a reward from a specific event represent three different states, and it is not appropriate to describe them as everyone automatically receiving a fixed dividend.

I’m more concerned about how things are handled after the trial period ends. If allocations can continue and there is enough net new trading activity to support demand, it could form a more stable token demand. If the rewards mainly change the attribution of existing LPs rather than increasing ongoing usage, then the protocol is merely re-splitting existing revenue. The implications of these two scenarios for long-term token holders are very different.

There are also two boundary lines: supply and decision-making power

The unlock schedule given in the official semiannual report is about 7.2222 million MET per month, split between team and ecosystem reserves; the team portion has already been moved to a Jupiter Lock with continuous releases. A fixed total amount does not mean fixed tradable supply, and you also cannot use the old lockup descriptions from early whitepapers to conclude that there is no new circulating supply today.

Similarly, it is not appropriate to broadly claim that MET holders have already decided the use of all revenue through a DAO. The project’s transparency disclosures indicate that the treasury and key parameters currently rely on the foundation and multi-signature management; there is no formal on-chain governance mechanism that has generally delegated these powers to token holders.

Public disclosure is a good thing, but whether disclosures are sufficient and whether holders have control are different issues.

My conclusion is that the link between MET and business revenue became specific in 2026: there are buyback records, and there are also expense allocations with conditions and trial periods. What still needs to be verified is whether this link can persist through market heat/cold cycles and subsequent unlocks.

The most useful signals for the next stage are the actual allocations after the staking plan renewal, the continuity of buyback execution, and the trades and liquidity that can still be retained after incentives are deducted. Showing only total volume or total fees cannot answer these questions.

Data timestamp: Binance market data as of 2026-09-24 20:51:59 (Beijing time); for the dates of other materials, see the notes in the text below.

This article is a compilation of public information and personal viewpoints, and does not constitute any investment advice. The announcements, on-chain data, and research judgments in the text have been separately marked; please verify for yourself.

Source of materials:

- Binance, Meteora spot listing announcement, 2025-11-13; MET/USDT fixed行情 snapshot, Beijing time 2026-09-24 20:51:59.860. - Meteora, 2026 H1 Token Holder Report, 2026-08-11, business data through 2026-06-30.

- Meteora, Introducing the Meteora Referral Staking Program, 2026-07-20; first-cycle feedback announcement, 2026-08-04.

- DeFiLlama, Meteora protocol revenue interface and sub-protocol statistics methodology, read on 2026-09-24. - Blockworks, Meteora Token Transparency Filing, 2026-02-18, accessed on 2026-09-24.

- Meteora investor relations website and wallet directory, accessed on 2026-09-24.