The Protocol That Earns a Fee Every Time Anyone Trades on Solana Has Two Upgrades Hitting in the Next 30 Days

Solana is getting faster in four days. The chain already routes billions in daily trading volume, and it’s about to increase transaction size, making complex swaps cheaper and cleaner. 

Then in October, finality drops to under 150 milliseconds. If you want to sit in front of both of those without just buying more SOL, the answer is one layer down.

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What This Protocol Actually Does

Meteora (MET) is the liquidity infrastructure most of Solana’s DeFi sits on top of. Its main product is the Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker, or DLMM, which lets liquidity providers concentrate capital around the current price and earn more fees without spreading thin across a wide range. 

New token launches default to it. Stablecoin pools run on it. Yield vaults use it as a base layer. 

When STONK ran 400% in seven days, most of that volume ran through Meteora’s pools. When Anonymous Cat launched on Solana, it put its largest liquidity pool on Meteora’s DLMM, and Meteora captured close to 48% of the token’s trading volume on launch day.

The Upgrades in Front of It

Solana’s Transaction V1 activates around September 15. It lifts the maximum transaction size from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes, which means complex swaps fit into a single transaction instead of getting split into multiple. 

That’s a direct improvement for the sophisticated routing Meteora’s DLMM does. Alpenglow comes in October and targets finality under 150 milliseconds. Every millisecond shaved off attracts more high-frequency volume to Solana’s DEX layer. That volume runs through protocols like Meteora. The fee revenue follows.

The AA Rating

DefiLlama and Forgd recently scored 128 major tokens through a new Universal Token Rating system. Meteora received an AA with a composite score of 58.48, second only to Uniswap’s AAA. 

The rating reflects tokenomics transparency, insider wallet disclosure, and market performance like liquidity depth and spreads. 

An AA from that kind of system means allocators who screen on transparency can now put MET on a list it wasn’t on before. That changes the buyer pool.

The Buyback Program

Since Q4 2025, Meteora has been allocating protocol revenue to buy back MET from the open market. 

The initial buyback spent $10.6 million to acquire 2.3% of total supply. Cumulative buybacks have now reached $13.7 million, covering nearly 4% of total supply. The protocol also launched Comet Points, a non-tradable loyalty system where staking MET and using the protocol earns points redeemable for airdrop access and presale allocations. 

The goal is to keep long-term holders in and short-term flippers out.

Financial Outlook and Market Position

The Valuation Case

At under $150 million in market cap, Meteora trades at less than a third of Raydium’s valuation, despite competing for the same Solana DEX flow. DLMM handles 86% of Meteora’s own trading volume and generates more fees per dollar in concentrated liquidity ranges than traditional AMM designs. 

The protocol ranks 13th in TVL on Solana and, on active trading days, generates more fees than Jupiter and Sanctum combined. The market is pricing it like a secondary player. The on-chain activity does not quite line up with that.

What It Processed

In Q1 2026, Meteora processed $19.5 billion in trading volume. That’s a 36% drop from Q4 2025 when Solana memecoin activity was running hot, but it’s still $19.5 billion in a single quarter from a protocol below $150 million in market cap. 

Q1 fees came in at $105.9 million, with $11.4 million in protocol revenue. The team closed Q1 with $32.8 million in treasury and more than two years of runway. 

Active development continued through September, with a DBC SDK update, an Agave pool validator fix, and a DBC Core upgrade all shipping in the past week.

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Bear Case

The Holder Income Number

This is the number that changes the framing. 

Holder Income, the value flowing directly to MET governance token holders, collapsed from $12.68 million in Q4 2025 to $47,770 in Q2 2026. The buyback program removes tokens from supply, which supports the price mechanically. 

But if you’re buying MET expecting income to flow through to you as a holder, the Q2 number says that’s not what’s happening right now. Whether that changes as volume recovers from the memecoin cycle slowdown is an open question.

The Co-Founder Situation

Benjamin Chow, Meteora’s co-founder, resigned in February 2025 following the LIBRA memecoin controversy. 

He now faces a federal RICO class action lawsuit alleging pump-and-dump schemes across multiple tokens involving celebrity endorsements from Melania Trump and Argentine President Javier Milei, with alleged retail losses exceeding $57 million. 

Trump-linked wallets received $4.2 million in MET airdrops around the time the lawsuit was filed. Separately, Meteora disclosed in its Q1 2026 report that $1.5 million was lost to an OTC scammer during token buyback attempts, with a police report filed. The team was upfront about it. But the headline is still what it is.

The Supply Overhang

Only about 54.5% of the 1 billion total MET supply is circulating right now. That leaves 455 million tokens yet to enter the market through team vesting, treasury distributions, and ecosystem grants. The buyback program has retired nearly 4% of total supply, but it’s working against an unlock schedule that’s considerably larger than what’s been bought back so far. Every quarter brings more supply into circulation.

Outlook and Investment Thesis

The Setup

You’re buying the fee-generating infrastructure layer underneath Solana’s DeFi volume, ahead of two chain-level upgrades that should increase that volume. The protocol has an AA institutional rating, a treasury with two-plus years of runway, and a buyback mechanism pulling supply off the market every quarter. Raydium, the closest Solana peer, trades at more than triple Meteora’s market cap. That gap is what you’re trying to capture.

The Next 30 Days

Transaction V1 in four days. Alpenglow in roughly four to six weeks. Both directly beneficial to DEX infrastructure on Solana. 

If daily active users and DEX volume respond to faster, cheaper transactions, Meteora’s fee revenue grows alongside it. You want the position before that data shows up in the weekly numbers, not after.

How to Think About It

Build a position with the RICO lawsuit, the Holder Income collapse, and the 455 million unreleased tokens already in your thinking. 

This is not a clean story. It’s a fee-generating infrastructure play with reputational baggage, a complex token economy, and two near-term catalysts that could push volume meaningfully higher. 

Scale in now, add on any dip before Transaction V1, and hold into the Alpenglow data in October. If Solana’s DEX volume numbers don’t improve in the 30 days after both upgrades, the thesis isn’t playing out, and you reassess then.

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