Metis Surges 50% as Ecosystem Projects Eye $360M in Grant Rewards

Metis (METIS), the native cryptocurrency of layer 2 network Metis, surged as much as 50% in the past 24 hours before giving back some gains, as a previously announced grant made the rounds in crypto circles on X, galvanizing investor interest in the token and related projects.

The price surge extended 30-day gains to over 240%, data tracked by Coingecko show, as trading volumes for the tokens jumped to over $50 million on Tuesday from just $2 million at the start of December.

Metis is part of a cohort of layer-2 scaling protocols that allow users to transact on the Ethereum blockchain faster and for cheaper fees but with their own ecosystem projects and tools.

Earlier this month, the MetisDAO Foundation, which maintains Metis, unveiled an Ecosystem Development Fund (EDF) of 4.6 million METIS dedicated to bootstrap development, liquidity, activity, and adoption in the Metis ecosystem.

The amount is worth over $360 million as of Tuesday at current prices. Disbursements to projects are expected to start in the first quarter of 2024 after the release of the Metis decentralized sequencer, or a technology that distributes nodes that process transactions all over the globe.

Users widely expect these rewards to trickle down to them as they use applications built on the Metis network. That has helped bolster the value locked on Metis projects to over $500 million as of Tuesday from just under $100 million last week, data shows.

Tokens of some ecosystem projects have more than doubled in the past week: staking tool Maia’s MAIA token has surged 97%, and swapping protocol Hermes’ HERMES token has jumped 140%.

Annualized rewards on the popular HERMES and METIS liquidity pool have jumped to 200%, while riskier trading pairs offer as much as 350%, data from Hermes shows.

Trading volumes on the decentralized perpetual trading protocol Tethys spiked to over $18 million in the past 24 hours from an average of under $10 million in the prior weeks, bumping prices of the TETHYS tokens by 60%.