Metis Cryptocurrency Surges 50% Following Ecosystem Development Fund Announcement

According to CoinDesk, Metis (METIS), the native cryptocurrency of layer 2 network Metis, experienced a surge of up to 50% in the past 24 hours before giving back some gains. This followed the announcement of a grant that sparked investor interest in the token and related projects. The price surge extended 30-day gains to over 240%, with trading volumes for the tokens jumping to over $50 million on Tuesday from just $2 million at the start of December. Metis is part of a group of layer-2 scaling protocols that enable users to transact on the Ethereum blockchain faster and for lower fees, but with their own ecosystem projects and tools. Earlier this month, the MetisDAO Foundation, which maintains Metis, revealed 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 begin in the first quarter of 2024 after the release of the Metis decentralized sequencer, a technology that distributes nodes that process transactions worldwide. Users widely anticipate these rewards to trickle down to them as they use applications built on the Metis network. This has helped increase the value locked on Metis projects to over $500 million as of Tuesday from just under $100 million last week. 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 risen to 200%, while riskier trading pairs offer as much as 350%, according to data from Hermes. 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%.