Mettalex, a decentralized crypto and commodities derivatives trading platform powered by Fetch.ai, announced today the initial distribution of the platform’s MTLX staking tokens to FET holders as it prepares to go live.
Starting September 3, the first one million MTLX tokens will be allocated to FET holders over the next 21 days in anticipation of the launch of new staking and liquidity pools in the coming weeks.
On Mettalex, participants can create spreads on commodities by taking long and short positions using the platform’s two-token solution, powered by Fetch.ai. Mettalex’s position-based tokens are integrated with reference price feeds for settlement and pricing of commodity tokens and represent derivatives of those commodities. Traders in the commodity tokens will be able to open and close positions using stablecoin collateral and trade against other participants or automated market makers.
“Through this system, the entirety of collateral of an asset does not need to be tied up in a smart contract, which allows contracts of much larger sizes to be traded with lower collateral requirements,” said Philip Price, Commercial Director at MLTX. “Trillions of dollars of trading and new markets can be unlocked through Mettalex and we are avidly growing our community and ecosystem to reach this goal.”
Working alongside a consortium of steel mills, shipping companies, trading firms, trade banks, and brokerage houses, Mettalex will enable the digitization of the $2.5 trillion commodities markets by plugging off-chain assets such as copper, gold, silver and other metals to on-chain finance. By allowing participants to create spreads and take exposure on commodity/crypto spreads (e.g Gold and BTC) as well as a pure commodity-based spread e.g. between Copper Ore and Copper Cathode (raw material to finished good), Mettalex is providing a useful tool for commodities traders who are actually taking raw material and moving it along a production process, with price risk built into that timeline.
“On Mettalex, individuals and institutions will be able to take on exposure on assets that are not traded in conventional markets today,” said Humayun Sheikh, CEO of Fetch.ai. “We have seen banks fall out of love with the commodity markets, which has created a vacuum for commodity finance. By bringing traditional instruments such as commodities swaps, futures, or even commodity finance into DeFi, Mettalex will be an especially valuable tool for traders who want to create spreads and take exposure on commodities.”
FET will play an integral role in the Mettalex system, as the MTLX DEX will use the Fetch.ai ledger for high transaction rates and MTLX Automated Market Maker (AMM) will run on the Fetch.ai network for increased capability. In this framework, Fetch.ai agents and collective learning enable monitoring of process metrics throughout the supply chain.
