Gold Rush Handbook | New Player in the DEX Track Metric: Backed by Uniswap Veteran

Former Uniswap executive steps in, how does Metric leverage to disrupt the DEX market?

Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News

In the DeFi world, DEX is no longer a rarity.

However, recently, a project called Metric has attracted market attention.

It has garnered interest from ecosystems like Robinhood Crypto and BNB Chain, along with a technical lead who previously worked at Uniswap Labs. Even before its public launch, Metric had already facilitated trades from DEX aggregators through its liquidity pool. According to DefiLlama data, Metric's trading volume over the past 30 days reached $3.917 billion.

Source: DefiLlama

Metric does not intend to simply replicate Uniswap; instead, it aims to allow its trading pools to directly reference external market prices. When market prices change, the liquidity within the pools can also shift, without relying solely on arbitrageurs to drive prices back to equilibrium.

This design is particularly suitable for a class of assets entering the crypto market: tokenized stocks, gold, foreign exchange, and other real-world assets (RWA).

After all, the price of a US stock has already changed in the securities market; why should an on-chain trading pool wait for arbitrageurs to trade before it can catch up with the market?

Currently, Metric has officially launched its DEX, deployed on Ethereum, Robinhood Chain, and BNB Chain. The cumulative trading volume displayed on its official website is approximately $23.92 billion.

What is the background of Metric?

Metric utilizes Active Pools and propAMM infrastructure to build an on-chain trading market for tokenized stocks and other real-world assets.

The core design of Metric separates pricing logic from liquidity allocation. Pools that use external reference prices can adjust their quotes after receiving effective price updates, without relying entirely on arbitrage trading to complete this adjustment.

The resume of Metric's CTO Christos Gkolias is noteworthy. He previously worked as a software engineer at Google and held engineering management positions at Uniswap Labs. In a personal announcement, he stated that he worked at Uniswap Labs for three and a half years and has been developing with the Metric team for four months.

For a project attempting to improve the AMM trading mechanism, such a technical background is relevant to Metric's current development direction.

Recently, two official interactions from the ecosystems have brought attention to Metric:

• On October 13, Robinhood Crypto quoted and shared Metric's deployment announcement on Robinhood Chain, welcoming Metric to join.
• On October 14, BNB Chain quoted and shared Metric's deployment announcement, introducing that users can trade bStocks through Metric and provide liquidity.

This information indicates that Metric has entered the product deployment and official communication scope of the relevant ecosystems. Assessing its long-term competitiveness will require further examination of its pricing mechanisms, trading access capabilities, and actual trading performance.

How does Metric operate?

To understand Metric, one can first look at a problem with traditional AMMs.

Suppose the external market reference price for a tokenized stock rises from $100 to $105, but the on-chain trading pool has not yet adjusted its quotes.

In traditional AMMs, the price within the pool is primarily formed based on the asset reserve ratios and trading changes. Arbitrageurs may take the opportunity to buy tokens from the trading pool at a relatively low price, ultimately pushing the pool's price closer to the external market. While the market price is corrected, liquidity providers may bear losses from unfavorable trades.

Metric aims to change this process. According to the official documentation, Metric's core design separates pricing and liquidity allocation into two independent parts: Price Provider and Active Pool.

First, the Price Provider is responsible for providing prices.

It is an independent smart contract that can provide reference prices, buy quotes, and sell quotes for the trading pool based on oracles, on-chain data, or custom algorithms.

For example, if the reference price for a tokenized stock is $100, Metric can determine the trading price based on this reference price and the corresponding quoting rules.

If the external reference price rises to $105, the trading pool can adjust to the new price benchmark without waiting for arbitrageurs to push the price up.

Second, the Active Pool is responsible for holding liquidity and executing trades.

Unlike traditional concentrated liquidity AMMs with fixed absolute price ranges, Metric allocates liquidity within percentage ranges relative to the reference price, with each range referred to as a Bin. Each tier covers a percentage range, and when the reference price changes, the corresponding prices of these ranges also change.

For example, a tier covering the range "1% to 2% above the reference price" would correspond to $101 to $102 when the reference price is $100. If the current active tier is this one and the price within the pool is at the midpoint of the tier, then the deviation from the reference price is +1.5%, and the current price in the pool, not accounting for buy-sell spreads, is $101.50.

If the reference price rises to $105, under unchanged conditions and without any trades or capital inflows/outflows during that period, this tier would shift to $106.05 to $107.10. The current price would still be at the midpoint, corresponding to approximately $106.58.

In other words, updates to the reference price will move the quoting range while maintaining the current percentage deviation. During actual trading, one must also consider buy-sell spreads and the price impact caused by trading consuming liquidity and pushing the pool's price changes.

The liquidity pool can also set additional rules through extension modules.

Extensions can set conditions for trading, deposits, and withdrawals, such as restricting participating addresses, rejecting trades that exceed a set risk threshold, or preventing transactions during price anomalies. Of course, the extension modules can allow or deny operations but cannot rewrite the quotes that have already been read for that transaction.

So, how can ordinary users participate? And what fees do they need to pay?

Ordinary users and professional market makers can choose different participation methods. Ordinary users can trade assets or provide liquidity to public pools that accept external funds. The liquidity pool manager is responsible for selecting pricing contracts and parameters, while liquidity providers choose which tiers to invest their funds in.

Professional market makers can also operate private liquidity pools, using their own funds and custom pricing strategies to provide base quotes and execute trades. This automated market-making model, where market makers use proprietary quoting strategies to execute trades through on-chain liquidity pools, is commonly referred to as propAMM. It is one of the active liquidity pool types supported by Metric.

Regarding fees, Metric's official explanation states that no separate trading fees or front-end fees are added during trade execution; the buy-sell spreads and applicable pool fees are already reflected in the quotes. The fees in the quotes mainly include three parts:

• Buy-sell spread: The pricing contract provides buy prices, sell prices, and reference prices, and the difference between the buy and sell quotes and the reference price constitutes the spread cost.
• Tier (bin) additional fees: The liquidity pool manager can set additional fees for certain liquidity tiers, with buy and sell rates configurable separately. If a trade crosses multiple tiers, the fees for each tier only apply to the portion executed in that tier.
• Protocol fees charged based on transaction volume: Defaulted to off, Metric can enable this for specific liquidity pools, with a maximum rate of 1% of the transaction volume.

Fee revenues also have different distributions: buy-sell spread and tier additional fee revenues are distributed among liquidity providers, liquidity pool managers, and Metric according to configurations. The default share for Metric listed in the official documentation is 7.5% of the total spread revenue, calculated based on the spread revenue; if the protocol fees based on transaction volume are enabled, they belong to the protocol.

What advantages does Metric have?

From a technical perspective, Metric does not aim to replace all AMMs but seeks to address the limitations of traditional trading pools in specific asset trading scenarios.

Its main advantages can be summarized in three aspects.

First, it reduces arbitrage losses caused by price lags.

Traditional AMMs rely on arbitrageurs to pull the pool's price back to market levels. During rapid market fluctuations, arbitrageurs may execute trades with outdated quotes, leading liquidity providers to bear corresponding losses.

Metric has the opportunity to reduce the arbitrage space generated by price update lags by adjusting the trading pool quotes based on external reference prices.

However, this does not mean that Metric can eliminate all arbitrage activities. Issues such as oracle delays, unreasonable quoting strategies, and on-chain transaction ordering may still lead to losses.

Additionally, the Metric mechanism is more suitable for financial assets with mature external prices.

Taking tokenized stocks as an example, the trading pool can reference relevant price data to form quotes in conjunction with buy-sell spreads and liquidity conditions, without relying entirely on arbitrageurs to correct prices.

Second, the "Aggregators" section on the Metric website lists entry points such as 0x, 1inch, OKX, KyberSwap, CoW Swap, Velora, Bitget, PancakeSwap, GMGN, Banana Gun, etc., covering aggregators, trading applications, and trading tools. It aims to provide a distribution network that allows liquidity pools to access multiple trading entry points.

Moreover, Metric has made oracles, quote updates, and contract bases into reusable facilities. In terms of price data, Metric provides shared oracle contracts supporting Chainlink and Pyth, as well as compressed oracles for self-market-making quotes. Market makers can reuse these facilities to reduce the repetitive work of deploying and maintaining pricing systems.

The Metric website lists block builders such as Titan, BuilderNet, and 48 Club. According to the official documentation, some builders will place the latest received quote updates before relevant trades in the blocks they produce. This helps reduce the chances of outdated quotes being exploited, but the applicability depends on the chain and participating builders, and not all trades receive the same ordering guarantees.

In terms of security audits, the website emphasizes that all liquidity pools use common core contracts and lists two auditing firms, Zellic and Sherlock.

Metric's official risk documentation clearly states that malicious or compromised managers with unconstrained pricing abilities may exhaust pool funds through erroneous quotes; even if strategies operate normally, changes in positions caused by trading may still lead to losses.

Conclusion

As of October 16, 2026, I have not found a clear native token issuance arrangement, nor has the token economic model, TGE timing, or airdrop rules been disclosed.

However, Metric invited users to register (Submit) their wallets on July 8 (currently only wallet connections are allowed) and mentioned opportunities for early incentives, but this announcement did not specify the form of incentives and did not promise to airdrop tokens to registered users. Therefore, it is still unclear whether it will issue tokens in the future.

As tokenized stocks, gold, and more RWA products enter the blockchain, the assets faced by the on-chain market are changing.

These assets are not lacking in price; what is lacking is a liquidity infrastructure that can efficiently follow external markets while accommodating on-chain trading demands.

Metric's approach revolves around this issue.

By utilizing external reference prices, movable liquidity ranges, and customizable market-making strategies, it attempts to make AMMs more suitable for assets that already have mature pricing systems.

The team's background, interactions with Robinhood Crypto and BNB Chain's official Twitter accounts have brought attention to the project; the aggregator network and multiple rounds of audits supplement the infrastructure needed for product landing. However, especially in the tokenized asset market, pricing is just the first step; the real competition lies in sustained trading depth, market-making costs, risk management, and user acquisition capabilities.