What is Mettalex?

Mettalex is a spin-off project from Fetch.ai. It is founded by Fetch.ai’s Founder - Humayun Sheikh - who has deep knowledge of the commodities trading sector and more specifically - the metals markets. Aware of the market inefficiencies in the ferrous commodities sector, Humayun came up with a cost and capital-efficient solution based on blockchain technology, token economics, industry-grade pricing data, and the liquidity available in the DeFi space.

Mettalex is a blockchain-based commodity derivatives exchange (DEX) that aims to bring the $20T commodities markets on-chain, democratize access to commodity markets, and offer a hedging tool to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the commodities supply chain.

Mettalex has signed price data licensing agreements with industry-grade data providers including S&P Global Platts, Javelin Commodities, and Davis Index. As a result, Mettalex has access to reliable oracle data for a wide range of traditional commodity markets including Uranium, Lithium, Zinc, Aluminum, Copper, Brent Crude, Natural Gas, Cobalt, HMS, Iron Ore, Copper, and more. Mettalex also uses Chainlink and DIA feeds for crypto commodity markets.

The DEX lists selected crypto commodities, including BTC, ETH, BNB and others, as well as spreads between traditional and crypto commodities, for example - BTC/GOLD.

The Ethereum testnet and Binance Smart Chain mainnet versions of the DEX were launched in February 2021. Currently, the DEX is running on Binance Smart Chain testnet and mainnet.

Features

Unique Markets - Thanks to collaborations with major index providers, Mettalex is able to list markets that are not available anywhere else in the DeFi/crypto space.

Autonomous Market Making (AMM) - The Mettalex autonomous market makers act as the opposite side to any trade, enabling any order to be executed as long as the user is willing to pay the long/short price and fee determined by the AMM.

Banded Trading - All trading on the Mettalex DEX is performed within a price band which is based on historical price volatility. Thus, the exposure to price volatility is limited. A market remains active as long as the real-world price of the commodity does not go over the cap or below the floor.

Unique Derivatives - Unlike traditional futures and options contracts, open long/short positions on Mettalex have no expiry date. A market is settled only if the price band is breached. Users can settle an open market position that hasn’t settled yet at any time by selling back their long/short tokens to the AMM.

Asymmetric Opportunities - When the oracle reported-price is close to one of the price bands’ ends and/or one trade side is overbought - taking the opposite position gets an attractive risk/reward ratio.

Limited Risk / No Margin Calls - Unlike other derivatives platforms and thanks to the banded trading approach, Mettalex users know the exact amount of upside and downside they are exposed to. They know exactly how much they can earn or lose before opening any order. There are no liquidations due to insufficient account balance.

Leverage / Capital Efficiency - Trading on Mettalex is capital-efficient since the user needs to provide collateral equal only to a fraction of the commodity’s market price. What that fraction is depends on how wide the price band is and where the market price is within that band.

Fully Collateralized Positions - All open positions on Mettalex are fully collateralized with stablecoins. There is no under or over-collateralization. Other types of collateral - for example more volatile cryptocurrencies - are to be incorporated in the future.

Long And Short Position Tokens - All open positions on the DEX are represented by tokens owned by the user. The user can sell those on Mettalex at any time before price band breach. These tokens could potentially be used as collateral on other DeFi platforms.