Mettalex — An Intro for Gem Hunter’s
A small team in Cambridge (UK) has been working on bringing AI to the blockchain via Autonomous Economic Agents since 2017, and are now leveraging their tech to capitalize on a $20T+ market that nobody else in crypto is addressing.. DEX (decentralized exchange) for commodities.
How’s that for buzzwordy?
If you’re skeptical, it’s warranted.. but what if I told you the Cambridge team spun out of Deepmind (AI acquired by Google), has a track record of delivering, hosts one of the more active github’s in crypto, and is on the verge of major product launches? Also that the market cap for their two projects, Fetch AI ($FET) and Mettalex ($MTLX) are only $167m and $25m, respectively..
Well my gem hunting friends, that’s the case.
There’s a bunch of information about the two projects all over the internet, but a lot of it is scattered. So the purpose of this article is to provide an introduction to their DEX, Mettalex. In order to do so, we have to first touch on Fetch AI.
Index
- Fetch AI Intro
- Mettalex Intro
- The Team
- The Track Record
- Additional Resources
1. Fetch AI Intro
Fetch AI is the origin project: started in 2017, made up of a rockstar team from Deepmind + PhD’s and dev’s with solid backgrounds (more on that in Section 3), and with the goal of bringing AI to the blockchain. They’re building a platform from the ground up (not an erc20 token) that enables AEA’s (autonomous economic agents) to interact with each other in order to solve problems and/or optimize processes.
I don’t want to go too far into this as there has already been a ton written (read up on their tech, the coin, and their staking pool), but the tl;dr is that killer applications can be built on top of $FET — a decentralized version of Uber, a travel agent service, decentralized exchanges, and more.
Rather than wait for others to build these on $FET, the team decided to put their money where their mouth is and build one themselves to prove out the value of the network. The first use case they are building is a decentralized commodity exchange, Mettalex.
If you want to vet Fetch AI and fall down that rabbit hole a bit more, check out what they’ve been up to:
- Major partnerships with Bosch, Festo, Telekom (T-Mobile), and more
- To get a sense of the possibilities for their partnerships, watch the first few mins of this Festo vid and this Bosch AI vid
- Mainnet 2.0 launching Q1 2021
2. Mettalex Intro
The DEX space is on fire — $UNI has a $7b+ market cap, then you have $SUSHI, $CAKE, $ZRX, and $AAVE all with billion dollar+ market caps.. and the values are warranted with over $10B/day of volume flowing through the top dex’s.
All these guys are competing in the same market; decentralized exchanges for crypto pairs. Mettalex was launched (built on top of $FET) to service a different use case and audience altogether— commodity pairs (think steel, aluminum, oil, etc.). The commodities exchange market is estimated to be anywhere between $1T and $20T+!
So when did they launch and what have they done since?
- 1st public announcement was in May 2020
- Launched the $MTLX coin in September 2020 w/ fair distribution and immediately began growing a community with farming and rewards
- Built liquidity on Uniswap via staking programs in October and November of 2020
- Launched their early access beta at the end of November 2020
- Expanded to Binance Smart Chain (in addition to ETH) in December 2020
- Continued building liquidity with their Amplify farming program in January 2021
- Launched an additional staking program with $FET, Phoenix, in February
- annnd they are launching their platform this week (February 2021)… they say they have traders ready to go (and I believe them.. more on that in Section 4)
So, now that we know a bit about the market and history, who is behind this project and why do we think they have a chance to succeed?
3. The Team
The CEO and Founder of both Fetch AI and Mettalex is Humayun Sheikh. An engineer who was an early investor in Deepmind and responsible for finding realworld applications for their AI. Looks like he made $6m-$8m when they sold to Google.
After Deepmind, he became the Chairman for a commodity trading company and grew the business to $30m by applying technology. He had a couple other projects before founding Fetch AI in 2017 and focusing on that full time ever since.
The CTO of Mettalex is Matt McDonnell —a PhD Physicist by way of Oxford with a research background in quantum computing. He worked at financial institutions like HSBC and Fidelity Worldwide Investments as a quant and data scientist before joining Fetch in 2019.
So they clearly have the brain power, but the reality of the world is no project is successful without strong marketing. Luckily Mettalex has Vlad Dramaliev, an early BTC visionary with tons of experience in the blockchain space. Vlad founded Bulgaria’s first ever BTC exchange service in 2013, and has stayed in crypto ever since.
The assumption is that Mettalex is getting additional dev support from the Fetch team which has the make-up that you love to see (heavy on experienced devs and low turnover).
Some notable folks over there:
- Toby Simpson (ex Head of Software Design at Deepmind)
- Jonathan Ward (Fetch CTO that’s been with the project for 3+ years)
- David Minarsch (lead Economist for Fetch with Cambridge pedigree)
- Diarmid Campbell (software engineer who spent a lot of time managing an eng team at Sony)
- many more.. scroll through their Linkedin
All of this is great.. but can we trust them? Have they actually delivered against promises? Short answer, hell yes.
4. The Track Record
I skipped some smaller announcements in the middle there, but you get the point.. the Mettalex team delivers.
So what else have they teased that has yet to be formally announced?
- The Mettalex platform is to be released in February
- They have traders lined up and ready to process transactions through the platform at launch
- They will eventually be listed on Binance and other exchanges
- They will add more tradable pairings to their platform over time
- They will enable users to create their own pairings and markets
In summary, Mettalex is a dex for commodities built by a brilliant and experienced team on top of a revolutionary AI blockchain. The platform is just about to launch, and there is no competition in sight. The market cap of $MTLX is sitting at $25m with tons of room to grow as they take on more trading pairs.
For those that want to learn more..
5. Additional Resources
- Official Telegram
- Unofficial Trade Chat Telegram
- Official Twitter
- CEO’s Twitter (Humayun)
- Head of Marketing’s Twitter (Vlad)
- Twitter for early believer and diamond-hand-haver, MoonShotJosh
- Want to buy? You can find $MTLX on Uniswap, MXC, and HitBTC. You can also stake your ETH or USDT and farm $MTLX
- lmk what I missed and I’ll update
A quick shout out to the $ZNN community for inspiring me to make this post.. fell into the $ZNN rabbit hole with their community-created overview, and felt prospective $MTLX gem hunters deserved something similar.
