We spoke with the Metric team earlier this month as part of our tokenized stocks research, but I think the DEX itself deserves a separate look ahead of its public app and infra launch. Today you can already trade through Metric, and possibly already have. They have processed over $19B in spot volume through their aggregator integrations, while the website still says “coming soon.” Not a typical starting point for a new launch! 

Aggregators route orders into their pools, so they’ve been able to build volume before opening more broadly. A few numbers caught my attention:

• $6.4B in volume over the past 30 days (DefiLlama)
• Roughly 49x daily volume-to-TVL, with $3.94M in average TVL – very strong capital efficiency with a small capital base
• 61% ($806M) of bStocks volume routed through Binance Wallet, over the last month (ending Sept 16th, per Metric)

How the pools work on Metric

While a conventional AMM that we are all familiar with gets its price from the assets in the pool and its trading curve, Metric’s Active Pools quote around an external reference price much like a prop AMM, with curators setting their own pricing and spread logic. 

As the reference price moves, the pool’s liquidity moves with it. That keeps the max amount of capital close to where people are actually trading, rather than sitting idle across a range – a big part of how Metric can support so much volume with relatively little TVL.

This approach works for any asset with established price feeds, such as crypto, stablecoins, and tokenized stocks. Keeping quotes fresh and strategy still matters of course, and high turnover doesn’t automatically mean high LP returns.

Distribution

While Metric essentially functions as a prop AMM today, the plan is to open its infrastructure to other market makers and LPs. The team puts it pretty simply:

“Anyone will be able to deploy a pool with custom pricing logic and inherit routing across every major aggregator from day one” 

The rollout is meant to give LPs and market makers different ways to use Metric:

• LPs can deposit into public pools and earn from trading activity without managing a price range
• Market makers can bring their own strategies, choose public or permissioned deposits, and use Metric’s existing aggregator integrations.

The pitch is that MMs can easily inherit Metric’s distribution without having to build and maintain each aggregator integration themselves (a lofty task on its own). That lets them focus on pricing strategy and inventory, with quotes immediately reaching into existing flow.

(Source)

Each MM then has a reason to tighten its spreads and offer more depth to win a larger share of that flow. Aggregators can route more of an order to whichever quote offers better execution for that trade size, after fees and gas. A maker that can price a larger order more competitively can win business from the others.

If that competition improves quotes, Metric should win more flow, which makes it more attractive for the next maker to join. Traders could get tighter spreads and less slippage, while Metric earns from the growing activity across those strategies. The pools still have to compete with liquidity elsewhere, but opening up the infrastructure gives more MMs a chance to improve execution on Metric.

Launch soon

Metric just shared its Sherlock audit update, with a focused review followed by a public audit contest ahead of launch. There’s still no firm date, but the public app and infra rollout looks to be getting close.

There could be a farm worth playing here as well. The team has mentioned early incentives and wallet registrations are already open for an edge at launch. If early participation eventually earns rewards in a native token, that could be an interesting way to get exposure to a DEX already doing very meaningful volume that will likely grow from here as the infra opens up to anyone.