Inside Meteora: Building Solana’s $100M Internet Capital Market Engine In this episode of When Shift Happens, I sit down with @realdezen and @0xSoju to discuss how a 20-person team built @solana's most advanced liquidity engine, why “Internet Capital Markets” are the next frontier, and what it really takes to launch culture-shaping tokens without losing the plot. @MeteoraAG didn’t begin as today’s sleek “liquidity layer”. Its roots trace back to Mercurial, a 2021-era Solana project that launched during the FTX boom. Zen, a product-first operator with a knack for team-building, joined early; Soju arrived later, a 25-year-old self-described “boomer’s foil” who came straight from national service with no degree and a bias for action. The pair embody Meteora’s yin-yang: Zen is reflective, systems-oriented; Soju is kinetic, emphatically bullish. Their partnership is the engine behind a portfolio of tools that, as they put it, help “bring the world to DeFi”. From Mercurial To Meteora, And A Sister Called Jupiter Mercurial’s first big idea, dynamic vaults that could route idle deposits into lending markets, was early. The lending landscape hadn’t matured, and a “zero-fee + token incentives” race to the bottom made profitability unsustainable. Rather than keep playing the game, the team tried something different: a routing experiment that became @JupiterExchange, Solana’s best-price aggregator. Legend has it the decision was made in a ramen shop, when @weremeow said “f*** it, let’s do it”, and the rest is well-known: Jupiter’s token would later debut at a peak ~$18B valuation. But the team refused to let Mercurial fade. FTX’s collapse created stigma they couldn’t control, so they chose a hard reset: rebrand to Meteora, rebuild credibility, and revisit the original vision with a better-timed stack. The guiding principles were simple: build technology that scales, make it composable for partners, and avoid behaviors that undermine trust. “We try our best to make sure we don’t … people over,” Zen says. “It’s about doing right by the community.” What Meteora Actually Is (And Why It Matters) If Solana is the rails, Meteora is the bank that holds the currencies and lets anyone swap between them. It is a programmable, market-making layer for new and old tokens. “We are the most innovative, most dynamic liquidity layer of Solana,” Soju explains. “About a million dollars a day in fees are generated across the LP Army (@met_lparmy),” he adds, nodding to the retail market-makers who supply pools and earn. Crucially, Meteora is designed for builders as much as traders. Zen frames it this way: projects with “very innovative and cool ideas”—from RWA to cultural tokens—shouldn’t need to wrestle with infra complexity. They plug into Meteora’s liquidity, inherit hardened launch playbooks, and focus on product. This is the “composability” advantage: one team’s liquidity becomes everyone’s distribution. Internet Capital Markets: The Big Idea If there’s one phrase that anchors the episode, it’s Internet Capital Markets (ICM). “Anybody with an internet connection should be able to tap into the capital markets of the world,” Soju says. Today, raising or reallocating capital often means geography, paperwork, and intermediaries skimming half your ten dollars. ICM flips that: tokenized instruments, 24/7 markets, and liquidity rails that are permissionless by default. You can hear the ambition when the conversation turns concrete. Want exposure to a condominium in Cambodia, treasuries, or a watch fund? Tokenize, list, and route liquidity through interfaces people already use: Phantom, Jupiter, Meteora itself. “It’s our liquidity that powers ICM,” Soju says. Solana’s speed moves the money; Meteora’s pools enable price discovery, fee streams, and flexible mechanisms so projects can raise in USDC without dumping their own tokens. That last bit matters because teams can get working capital without tanking markets. Launching Culture At Scale — And Doing It Safely Meteora’s technology also ran some of the most visible launches in crypto’s current cycle. After Jupiter’s record debut, the team became the venue for large-scale token events: Trump’s surprise coin (which they estimate generated roughly “20–30 million” in fees) and Kanye’s launch, among others. The bottomline isn’t celebrity; it’s scale and reliability. As Soju puts it, “We know how to handle scale… what allowed Trump to set up the launch so perfectly… couldn’t have been replicated elsewhere.” But scale invites scrutiny. How do you keep launches permissionless, fair, and not insider-tilted? The team’s answer is twofold: make the tech easier to use without hand-holding, and bake in visible safeguards. They introduced an anti-sniping suite, clearer risk flags (honeypots, concentrated holders), and UX cues surfaced across trading terminals (Jupiter, Moonshot, etc.). The goal is paradoxical but necessary: remove the need for Meteora’s people to be “in the room”, while ensuring launches remain orderly and defensible. “We want to reach a level where any engineer can pull it off in half a day,” Soju says. “Kanye’s coin launched perfectly, and we had no idea it was happening.” Token Design And The TGE Philosophy The most contrarian segment of the episode is Meteora’s view on token launches. Rather than optimize for a flashy FDV, they’re optimizing for volume—because volume equals fees and participation for the LP army. The team is releasing almost 48% of supply at TGE, with no vesting, and letting the community earn launch fees via pooled positions. “If you believe in our mission, hold the token,” Zen says. “If not, that’s fine too. We want to be liquid from day one and focus on building with people who are here for it.” They’re also not using the TGE to fundraise. With a small team and $100 million annual revenue, the plan is to plow resources back into product, infra, and hiring top engineers. “We’re still very far from our goal of every retail person on the street earning an extra $500 a day in passive income,” Soju says. It’s an ambitious line, but it captures the team’s ultimate mission: broaden access to yield, tools, and markets until DeFi is invisible, become useful enough that people don’t notice they’re on-chain. Lessons In Grit, Trust, And Timing Threaded through the technology is a human story: friends from university shipping conferences and start-ups; a young operator cold-calling his way into crypto after the army; a team choosing the hard path—rebuild, rebrand, repay early supporters—when it would have been easier to walk away. Zen keeps returning to first principles: “Do the right thing by the people who got you here.” Soju returns to forward motion: “Bullish. Just be bullish about everything.” That duality explains Meteora’s edge. It isn’t only faster code or clever mechanisms; it’s a sense about where markets are going, and discipline about how to get there. Meme and celebrity coins will persist, “It’s a cultural thing”, but the potential is broader: tokenizing anything useful, and making it tradable, ownable, and yield-bearing by anyone, anywhere. 👉If you enjoyed reading the summary, head over to When Shift Happens on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform to access the full convo.