7
min read
Feb 27, 2026
We are discontinuing Mettalex as an actively operated trading product and stepping back from running and/or attempting to go to market with the official exchange experience.
This is not a decision we reached quickly. We built, shipped, iterated, and tested in public across multiple market cycles, and we explored the paths that could plausibly lead to sustainable adoption. After weighing the time, cost, and risk required to continue operating a live trading venue against the probability of reaching durable liquidity and meaningful usage, pausing product operations is the more responsible outcome.
In this post, “we” refers to the Mettalex contributors and operators responsible for the official website, the official user interfaces, and any official off-chain services that supported the product experience. Not everything in the ecosystem is controlled by us, and part of this announcement is being explicit about those boundaries.
This post provides the context that matters: where Mettalex started, what was built, what is true about the project today, and what changes in practice for users and token holders.
History of Mettalex
Mettalex began in 2018 with a clear idea: bring commodity markets on-chain in a way that lowers barriers, increases transparency, and reduces the friction that commodity traders and producers face in traditional venues. That ambition became public in 2020, when Mettalex was announced as an autonomous-market-maker powered DEX for tokenized commodities, alongside the introduction of MTLX.
In 2021, Mettalex V1 launched as an AMM-based commodities DEX. It introduced banded pricing mechanics and a set of tokenized commodity derivative markets designed to prove that on-chain commodity exposure could work safely and transparently. Through 2022, the product remained stable and the contracts performed as intended, but liquidity constraints and the realities of a specialized derivatives venue became clearer.
In 2023, the project pivoted from an AMM model to an agent-based P2P order-book architecture, aligned with Fetch.ai’s autonomous agent direction. The goal was to move beyond pool-based liquidity and into decentralized coordination: agents discover each other, negotiate trades, and settle trustlessly on-chain. In 2024, Mettalex V2 entered beta and demonstrated cross-chain P2P trading with an agent-driven model that can deliver zero-slippage execution when counterparties match. In 2025, the work focused on scale, security hardening, and a derivatives layer intended to support more advanced products.
State of Mettalex
Mettalex today is a set of deployed on-chain components and an agent-based cross-chain trading system that proved core concepts in test environments and a public beta. The architecture is real, and the execution over time was substantial. At the same time, an exchange is not validated by architecture alone. It succeeds when liquidity, settlement rails, distribution, and operating conditions align long enough to form a defensible marketplace.
Several factors have made that alignment increasingly unlikely. The trading landscape is far more competitive than when Mettalex started: dominant venues have deeper liquidity, polished UX, entrenched routing, and incentive budgets that are difficult to match. Liquidity has also fragmented across chains and interfaces, raising the adoption bar for any venue that is not already a default route.
Stable settlement rails matter. A derivatives venue depends on reliable, liquid settlement and collateral. Over the relevant period, stablecoin availability, cross-chain depth, and jurisdictional risk created persistent friction in standardizing settlement and collateral in a way that is both capital-efficient and broadly accessible.
Building an agentic trading system that is secure enough for critical mass is hard, and doing so while the underlying agent infrastructure is also maturing created real delivery constraints. For roughly a year and a half, the Mettalex developer team built the agentic side in parallel with the product side, and that dependency repeatedly stretched timelines. Mettalex V2 exists in beta only and was not released as a production mainnet product.
Token design could not outrun market structure. MTLX needed to be malleable as the platform evolved from V1 to V2 and beyond. That flexibility helped iteration, but it also added complexity for long-term holders and integrators who need stable expectations. Even well-intended tokenomics work is constrained by thin liquidity and the platform’s inability to bootstrap quickly enough to reach critical mass. In that environment, the token is not in an optimal position for near-term value accrual or immediate utility.
Finally, the broader regulatory period between 2022 and 2025 was especially difficult for anything that resembles derivatives, exchange activity, or stablecoin-dependent settlement. Even when the product direction is technically sound, an unstable regulatory environment increases uncertainty, cost, and downside risk. Operating a trading product responsibly requires a stable baseline: clearer rules, consistent enforcement expectations, and room to scale without repeatedly re-litigating the same questions across jurisdictions.
Taken together, continuing to operate Mettalex as a live trading venue would mean taking on more exposure while the path to defensible liquidity and stable operations remains uncertain. Stepping back from product operations is the lower-risk choice.
Announcement of operational transition
Mettalex will no longer be operated as an actively supported trading venue in the way the community expected. This is a change in product posture and operations, not a claim that the underlying technology work was invalid.
In practice, this means the Mettalex team will focus on technology and infrastructure rather than running an exchange product, growing a user base, or optimizing for revenue. We will continue developing advanced trading infrastructure, products, and platforms, but we make no promises of user onboarding, revenue distribution, or value accrual via a token for the time being.
As a consequence of the permanent nature of ERC20 tokens MTLX will continue to exist. However Mettalex makes no promises of utility, no guarantees of success, and no commitments that the project will prioritize market dynamics or token performance. Mettalex will remain technology-centric.
Technical transition
It is worth being concrete about what was built. At peak, the delivery team supporting Mettalex included seven engineers across agentic and backend systems, frontend, and QA, alongside product and marketing design, business development, and project leadership support. With that team, we developed a working autonomous P2P cross-chain trading system with reliable trades across testnets in the Cosmos and Ethereum ecosystems. We also delivered a bridge migration path from BSC to Ethereum that enabled the transfer of approximately 430k anyMTLX to MTLX.
The system includes an escrow mechanism that hands funds to agents and returns them to users, agent listeners that stay synchronized with on-chain activity, autonomous P2P trading executed by agents, user onboarding flows that create and link escrow and agent components, and order matching logic designed around on-chain decimal constraints. The design supports a ticker-style order book with first-come first-served mechanics, contract factory patterns for verification and fund transfers, checks intended to prevent double transactions, restart mechanisms for agent fault recovery, and operational tooling that has been tested at scale, including deployments with thousands of agents executing trades concurrently. Supporting infrastructure includes Kubernetes and DevOps capabilities for scaling, API security, agentic IAM and wallet security measures for backend, agent, and frontend interaction, and the ability to add additional chains dynamically without downtime. The frontend has also gone through UX improvements informed by ongoing user interviews.
The system design for P2P agentic trading and for cross-chain trades using autonomous agents has been documented. A portion of the work can be reused to support broader Web3 functionality in ASI:ONE, and we are working toward that.
Funds associated with governance proposal 29
Funds associated with the governance proposal at https://www.mintscan.io/fetchai/proposals/29 will be restored once a viable method to achieve that is available. This is an intent statement, not a guarantee of timing, and it is dependent on technical and operational feasibility.
Communications and support posture
We will operate on timelines and trajectories agreed internally and will decide if and when to publish information concerning timelines, deliverables, and milestones. When information is published, it will be shared through the official website and the project’s official X account referenced from that site.
Support will be limited and practical. We will prioritize critical notices, security-relevant communications, and clarity on any changes that affect users interacting with legacy components. Community channels may continue in a community-led capacity, but official responses are not guaranteed.
Important notices
This announcement is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, tax, or investment advice. Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any token.
MTLX never had an ICO or IEO and did not raise capital. MTLX was distributed via an airdrop to eligible participants in the FET ecosystem.
Anyone buying, selling, or otherwise interacting with MTLX does so entirely under their own volition and bears their own risk.
Mettalex makes no promises, guarantees, or suggestions concerning tokenomics improvements, delivery of value-accrual mechanisms, or the distribution of the token.
Mettalex makes no promises, guarantees, or suggestions concerning the roll out of technology across specific mainnets, subnets, or other networks. All technology delivery, specifications, configurations, and architectural decisions remain with Mettalex leadership and engineers to decide.
This post includes statements about plans and expectations. Those statements are forward-looking and may change due to security considerations, third-party dependencies, chain incidents, market conditions, regulatory changes, or other factors.
Interacting with smart contracts carries risk. You are responsible for your own actions, including verifying contract addresses, using reputable tools, and avoiding phishing links. Treat any accounts, links, or DMs not referenced from the official website as untrusted.
Conclusion
Mettalex aimed to open commodity and derivatives markets in a way that is more transparent and more accessible. The project delivered meaningful technical innovation, including a functioning commodities DEX in V1 and an agent-based cross-chain trading system that proved core concepts through testnets and a beta.
What did not emerge is the stable market structure needed to operate a competitive trading venue at scale: concentrated and defensible liquidity, stable settlement rails, and an operating environment where compliance expectations are sufficiently clear to support responsible growth. With intense competitive pressure, fragmented liquidity, stablecoin constraints, token design trade-offs, and the regulatory uncertainty that defined much of 2022 to 2025, stepping back from product operations is the more prudent path.
Mettalex will remain focused on technology. MTLX will continue to exist, but there should be no expectation of promised utility, value accrual, or token-led outcomes.