Ethereal is now Meridian: what happened to the Ethena perp DEX and how trading works on Robinhood Chain

01What happened to Ethereal

Ethereal was a perpetuals exchange that grew out of the Ethena ecosystem — the project behind USDe — and was run by a Cayman Islands company called Ethereal Ltd. Your trading balance there was held in USDe, Ethena's dollar-style token worth about one dollar. The venue had its own chain, an order book, 18 markets and leverage up to 50x on BTC and ETH.

Today its public market data shows all 18 of those markets marked as delisted — the project's own word for a market that has finished winding down — with zero volume over 24 hours, nobody holding a position, and the last funding update dated 26 August 2026 at 01:00 UTC. Positions that were still open at that point were settled at a final price.

What you will not find is an announcement. The Ethereal blog's last post is from 3 February 2026 and says nothing about closing, and the docs still describe the venue as being in "Mainnet Alpha". The team never published the shutdown date, any instructions for users, or what happened to open positions. This was an operational wind-down, not a hack — no exploit was reported.

The link to the successor is easy to confirm, though. Meridian's documentation contains a page called "Migrate from Ethereal", Meridian's terms are an agreement with "Ethereal Ltd and its related companies" under Cayman Islands law, and the old Ethereal docs even host a "Meridian Media Kit". Meridian opened on 1 July 2026 with prediction markets first; the perpetual contracts appear in its data from 28 August 2026, two days after Ethereal's last funding payment.

02If you still have money on Ethereal

Ethereal's own data still shows its USD collateral token with deposits and withdrawals enabled, a minimum deposit of 10 USDe and a withdrawal fee of 2 USDe, while every trading token is disabled. DefiLlama still counts roughly $1.7M sitting in the protocol, down from about $17.5M in late July 2026. There is no public confirmation that the withdraw button still works today, so test it with a small amount before you count on the rest.

The migration guide is blunt about what does not travel: "Ethereal balances, subaccounts, identifiers, signatures, approvals, and linked signers do not carry over." Read that guide first, connect the same wallet you used before, and see what the app offers you — there is a migrate flow in Meridian's code. Do not send fresh deposits to Ethereal to "move them later".

Old points are the other open question. Ethereal ran weekly points with Wednesday snapshots and Friday distributions, plus a six-month Ethena Exchange Points program announced in February 2026 that was meant to convert into ENA. Whether any of that converted or carried into Meridian Points is not published; third-party guides say points stay tied to the wallet, which is worth knowing but is not an official statement. If you are weighing a venue mainly for its rewards, our page on what trading points are really worth is the sober version of that arithmetic.

03How Meridian works: USDe, merUSD and an order book

Meridian trades on a blockchain called Robinhood Chain, where it went live as one of the first projects on 1 July 2026 (the chain ID you will see in a wallet is 4663). Your money sits in your own wallet on that chain, not in a broker account, and the exchange's rules are set by the Meridian team. One owner role on their side controls which markets exist, what the fees are and updates to the contracts — so you are trusting that team, not a regulator. The exchange contracts were reviewed by Guardian and ChainSecurity, and the same reports are linked from both the old Ethereal docs and the new Meridian docs.

Your orders meet other people's orders on a normal order book, the way they do on an exchange, and the result is then written to the blockchain. You trade against a balance in merUSD: you bring USDe, the dollar-style token described above, and it is wrapped one-for-one into merUSD, the token your exchange balance is actually held in. Gas on Robinhood Chain is paid in the chain's native asset, ETH, not in USDe, so keep a little of it for transactions. The minimum deposit is 10 USDe and the withdrawal fee is 1 merUSD.

Profit on a trade that is still open is not money you can withdraw — you have to close first. The withdrawal itself has to be signed by the main wallet you deposited from; a second wallet you added just to place orders cannot move money out. Plan for that before you deposit from a wallet you rarely open.

The venue takes its price from an outside price feed called Pyth Lazer. That feed sets what exchanges call the mark price — not the last trade you see on the screen — and that price decides your profit, the point where you get liquidated, your stop triggers and your funding.

All your crypto trades draw on one shared balance, so a loss on one can eat into another — that is cross margin. Gold, silver, SPY and QQQ (Meridian calls these mPerps) sit in a separate pot: you move balance into it one-for-one, free of charge, and only that pot is at risk there. So a bad gold trade cannot reach your bitcoin margin, and the other way round.

Ethereal used to need a waitlist and an access code. That check is gone in Meridian's developer notes, which points to open access, but nothing official says it outright — connect a wallet and see whether the app lets you in.

04What one trade costs: a worked example

Say you deposit 100 USDe, which becomes 100 merUSD on the exchange, and you use all of it as margin for a bitcoin position at 10x. That gives you a position worth 1,000 merUSD. If you take the price that is already sitting in the book, you pay the taker fee of 0.005% on the way in — that is 0.05 merUSD — and the same 0.05 merUSD when you close. Ten cents in total for the round trip. On the old Ethereal taker fee of 0.03% the same trade would have cost 0.60.

Now add funding. It is charged every hour, and the crypto contracts carry a baseline of 10% a year, which means a long pays a small amount by default when the market is calm. Ten percent a year spread over 8,760 hours is about 0.00114% an hour, so holding that 1,000 merUSD position for a full day costs roughly 0.27 merUSD. Your whole day, entry to exit, comes to about 0.37 — and the market itself moves far more than that: a 1% move against you on a 1,000 position is 10 merUSD, a tenth of your margin, gone.

05Markets, leverage and points

Thirteen contracts are live: nine crypto (BTC, ETH, SOL, HYPE, NEAR, ZEC, VVV, ENA and LIT) plus gold, silver, SPY and QQQ. The stock and metal contracts keep trading while their home market is closed, and the rules for that are worth reading before you hold one over a weekend: during a "mark-price gap" the price is frozen at the last value from the feed, and a position fee can be charged on both longs and shorts. If the idea of trading index and metal contracts on a crypto venue is new to you, start with how stocks work on a crypto exchange.

Meridian publishes no leverage table. Open the market you want in the app and read the maximum the order window gives you — and whatever it says, your first trade does not need to use it. On a venue you have only just met, the amount you put at risk decides everything: a small position with a stop already in place will teach you how the app behaves just as well as a big one, and costs you far less when you find out something you did not expect.

There is no Ethereal or Meridian token: nothing appears in the docs, the app or the data. Meridian Points are live and distributed weekly, with about 8.2 billion points issued as of the last update on 25 September 2026, of which roughly 450 million came from referrals. A referral program exists, but the app shows two different numbers — "20% of Points and 20% of Perps fees" in one place and "10% of their points" in another — so check what your own screen says before you promise a friend anything.

06Who cannot use it, and where else to look

The terms exclude users located in or controlled from the United States, and the app's geoblock message adds Australia: "not available to residents, citizens or companies incorporated in the United States of America, Australia and other restricted regions". The named sanctioned areas are parts of Russia and Ukraine — Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia. Russia as a whole is not named in the terms text, and neither the UK nor the EU is listed, but the full list behind "other restricted regions" is not published, and an IP-level block cannot be ruled out. Our page on checking exchange availability where you live explains how to test this without guessing.

Meridian is new, it publishes no leverage table, its referral page and app text give two different numbers, and its paperwork still carries the old name. If you would rather start somewhere with a longer public track record and a full market table, Hyperliquid is the straightforward comparison — you connect a wallet, deposit USDC and trade, and you can open the Hyperliquid app to look at the order book before you fund anything. For a side-by-side of the whole group, including Lighter, Pacifica and edgeX, see our perp DEX comparison.

If you do try Meridian, go in with an amount you would not mind losing, and set your stop at the moment you open the trade rather than afterwards. Close everything yourself and move the money back out instead of leaving a position sitting on a venue you have only just met — a young market can be quiet exactly when you want to get out of it.