Zeno Exchange Review 2026: Gasless Perps on Metis

Zeno Exchange is a decentralized perpetual futures exchange built natively on the Metis layer 2. It is described as offering cross-margin, multi-asset collateral and gasless trading, and it positions itself as a native perpetuals protocol for the Metis ecosystem.

The project has been tracked as a derivatives protocol since May 2024. Its total value locked is around $30,000, which is very small for a perpetuals venue, and two audits are listed. The team maintains a public code organisation with four repositories.

Several details are not published in the sources reviewed, including fees, funding rates, leverage limits, team identities and the content of the audits. Some similarly named tokens, such as Zeno Inu, show up in public reporting and are unrelated to this exchange.

A perpetual futures contract lets a trader bet on an asset's price rising or falling without an expiry date. On a decentralized perpetual exchange, trades are settled by smart contracts rather than a company holding your funds. Traders post collateral and can open leveraged long or short positions.

Zeno Exchange is described as using cross-margin, which means one shared collateral balance backs all open positions. It also supports multiple collateral assets, so deposits are not limited to one token. If losses push a position's collateral below the required level, the position is liquidated.

The protocol is described as gasless, which in practice means users are not asked to pay a network fee on each action. How that is implemented, and how prices and liquidity are sourced, is not published in the sources reviewed.

Zeno Exchange describes its trading as gasless, meaning users are not charged network gas per trade. The sources reviewed do not publish trading fees, funding rates, liquidation penalties or withdrawal costs.

Traders should check the fee schedule and funding rates in the exchange interface before opening a position. On perpetual exchanges these costs often matter more than gas, especially on leveraged trades held for days.

Two audits are listed for the project, but the auditors, dates and findings are not detailed in the sources reviewed. Audits reduce but do not remove smart-contract risk, and perpetual exchanges also depend on price oracles, liquidation logic and sufficient liquidity.

Users keep custody through their own wallet, but deposited collateral sits in the protocol's contracts. With TVL around $30,000, a single large trader or a contract flaw could have an outsized effect. No regulatory status or licence is published. Leveraged derivatives are high risk and not suitable for everyone, and are restricted in some countries, so check your local rules and only risk money you can afford to lose.

Zeno Exchange is for experienced DeFi users who already hold assets on Metis and understand leverage, funding rates and liquidation. It is not suited to beginners or to anyone who needs deep liquidity for large trades.