Meteora: decentralised exchanges rating breakdown
Solana, dynamic liquidity pools
A genuinely interesting design — its dynamic pools concentrate liquidity around price as it moves, which is why $335m of TVL supports $4.12bn of monthly volume. It is included because a lot of Solana routing ends up here whether the trader chose it or not.
A genuinely interesting design — its dynamic pools concentrate liquidity around price as it moves, which is why $335m of TVL supports $4.12bn of monthly volume. It is included because a lot of Solana routing ends up here whether the trader chose it or not.
How the score is built
Each criterion is scored 0–10 and weighted. The median column is the middle score across every entry in this ranking, so a row reads as a position rather than a number.
| Criterion | What we measured | Weight | Score | Category median | Rank | Weighted gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Has it been drained, and did anyone get paid back? | — | 30% | 5 | 5 | 5 of 9 | 0.00 |
| What traders actually paid | 0.3506 what traders actually paid · computed · 2026-08-27 · source | 25% | 2 | 7 | 8 of 9 | -1.25 |
| Depth and volume | $4.12bn 30-day volume · sourced · 2026-08-27 · source$335m total value locked · sourced · 2026-08-27 · source | 25% | 6 | 7 | 7 of 9 | -0.25 |
| Chains and assets | — | 12% | 2 | 6 | 6 of 9 | -0.48 |
| How hard the capital works | 12.3× per 30 days capital turnover · computed · 2026-08-27 | 8% | 7 | 7 | 4 of 9 | 0.00 |
Measured 27 August 2026 · weights and method · decided by what traders actually paid, worth -1.25 points against the median
Has it been drained, and did anyone get paid back?: 5/10
Contract exploits with dates, amounts and — the question every other comparison skips — whether users were actually made whole. A DEX is a set of contracts holding pooled money, so this is the first question, not the fifth. Audit count is recorded but never scored on its own: Balancer V2 was among the most audited contract systems in DeFi and lost $128m to a rounding error in November 2025.
Scored 5 of 10 against a category median of 5, which places it 5th of 9 among decentralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 30% weight that is exactly level with the median of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 9, the worst 1.
What traders actually paid: 2/10
Computed by us, not read off a fee-tier page: thirty days of protocol fees divided by thirty days of volume, per venue, from public data. That single division exposes what routing, tier mix and pool design really cost, and it disagrees with the advertised tiers everywhere. It is not the whole cost of a trade — slippage and gas sit on top — but it is the part every comparison misstates.
Scored 2 of 10 against a category median of 7, which places it 8th of 9 among decentralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 25% weight that is 1.25 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 1.
Depth and volume: 6/10
Total value locked and thirty-day volume, both from public data at a stated timestamp. Depth is what decides slippage on a real trade, and volume is what proves the depth is usable rather than parked.
Scored 6 of 10 against a category median of 7, which places it 7th of 9 among decentralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 25% weight that is 0.25 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 2.
Chains and assets: 2/10
The number of chains where the venue is actually deployed, weighted by whether volume genuinely flows there. A deployment on forty chains that trades on two is coverage on paper.
Scored 2 of 10 against a category median of 6, which places it 6th of 9 among decentralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 12% weight that is 0.48 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 2.
How hard the capital works: 7/10
Thirty-day volume divided by total value locked — how many times each dollar of liquidity turned over. Nobody publishes this, and it separates a venue whose pools are genuinely used from one sitting on idle incentive-farmed capital. It also predicts fee income per dollar of risk taken by liquidity providers.
Scored 7 of 10 against a category median of 7, which places it 4th of 9 among decentralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 8% weight that is exactly level with the median of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 3.
Its nearest neighbours in this ranking
Questions about this score
Why is Meteora so expensive compared to other Solana DEXs?
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Its volume skews toward volatile and newly launched pairs, where pool fees are set much higher than on major pairs — and the realised rate reflects what traders actually paid across that mix: 0.3506% against Orca's 0.0659% on the same chain. If your trade is a major pair that Orca or Raydium can fill, routing through Meteora is simply a worse price.
What are Meteora's dynamic liquidity pools?
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Pools that concentrate liquidity around the current price and shift as it moves, rather than spreading capital evenly across all prices. The effect is high capital efficiency — 12.3 times turnover a month here — and the trade-off is that liquidity providers are more exposed to sharp directional moves, since the position is always clustered near the price that is currently running away from them.