METL founder winds down fiat-to-crypto gateway
On 12 January 2026, METL founder Anna Vladi published a founder post-mortem stating that in 2025 she formally wound down METL, the U.S.-based fiat-to-crypto gateway that had launched staking-from-a-bank-account flows on Avalanche in 2022. Vladi wrote that the failure mode was infrastructure dependency: Prime Trust’s collapse and subsequent Bank of America closures of METL’s corporate and her personal accounts left the company without banking rails required to operate. A June 2026 LinkedIn post reiterated that she shut the company down the prior year because the ecosystem was not ready, not because the thesis was wrong. METL’s homepage now returns a Framer site-not-found page.