market-making

The U.S. Department of Justice's Northern California Prosecutor's Office announced that 10 executives and employees from four cryptocurrency market-making firms have been charged with allegedly manipulating token trading volumes and prices through wash trading, involving Gotbit, Vortex, Antier, and Contrarian.Three of the defendants have been extradited from Singapore to the U.S., and two others have pleaded guilty and been sentenced. The FBI and the IRS Criminal Investigation Division even created multiple cryptocurrency tokens during an undercover operation to investigate illegal volume manipulation and price inflation within the industry. Over $1 million in cryptocurrency assets have currently been seized.

The Sonic SVM Foundation announced the acquisition of ForgeX, a developer of on-chain market-making tools for the Solana blockchain, and officially open-sourced its core product, ForgeX CLI.ForgeX CLI is a set of on-chain operation tools for Solana developers, project teams, and AI Agents. It supports token creation based on multiple Launchpads, developer atomic purchases, same-block transactions, multi-wallet collaboration, volume management, and on-chain market-making across DEXs. All commands output structured JSON natively, which can be directly invoked and executed by AI Agents. The Sonic team stated that ForgeX CLI has been validated through multiple real projects, and this open-sourcing aims to lower the threshold for on-chain market-making and promote the evolution of the Solana ecosystem towards agent-driven on-chain operations.

The founder of crypto market maker Wintermute, Evgeny Gaevoy, analyzed the unusual fluctuations in the 1-minute charts of Bitcoin and ETH spot markets on February 8th. He indicated that it is likely due to a market-making bot experiencing a liquidation, with losses potentially reaching tens of millions of dollars. The unusual fluctuations were caused by the bot's losses rather than any malicious intent from market makers, and Wintermute was clearly not involved.Evgeny Gaevoy further expressed skepticism regarding rumors of "large institutions facing liquidation" in the market, and even if such cases do exist, they would not have a medium to long-term impact. In contrast to the past collapses of Three Arrows Capital and FTX, where liquidation news spread quickly and there were clear signs indicating the validity of the liquidations, such as institutions seeking rescue, the current market rumors mainly come from anonymous accounts and have not been confirmed by reliable sources.The leverage in this cycle primarily comes from perpetual contracts. Trading platforms no longer take risks with user assets to invest in low-liquidity assets or extend special credit as they did in the past. The tightening of credit has resulted in institutional credit sizes being less than $2 billion, which limits the impact and makes it difficult to trigger a chain liquidation like in 2022.Previous reports indicated that on February 8th, there were unusual fluctuations in the 1-minute charts of Bitcoin and ETH spot markets, with single-minute amplitudes exceeding 1% and even 3% from 00:05 to 00:17.

Perpetual Contract DEX StandX launches an innovative benefit of "Rewards for Placing Orders": Users only need to place limit orders without the need for actual transactions or positions to receive Maker Points; if the order is successfully executed, they can also earn additional Trading Points rewards.As the industry's first incentive model of this kind, StandX aims to lower the market-making threshold for users and enhance market liquidity.

According to financefeeds, Crypto.com is forming an internal market-making team to expand its prediction market business, hiring quantitative traders to handle the buying and selling of contracts related to sports event outcomes.Crypto.com responded that the trading team operates within the U.S. regulatory framework and has disclosed this to the CFTC, primarily providing liquidity support for North American derivatives business rather than engaging in proprietary trading for profit. The company emphasized that both internal and external market makers operate under the same rules, and the internal team does not have order flow priority or customer data advantages.This model is not unique in the prediction market. Kalshi uses designated market makers to support trading, and Polymarket is also building internal market-making capabilities. Prediction markets require continuous liquidity to function, but the establishment of in-house market-making teams raises concerns about conflicts of interest, with the key issue being how to handle transparency, data access, and information disclosure.

According to Bloomberg, Polymarket is hiring new team members to form an internal market-making team that may trade with clients on the company's trading platform. This functionality has previously drawn criticism from its main competitors.Sources revealed that the company has recently spoken with several traders, including sports betting traders, to invite them to join this new department. Polymarket declined to comment on this matter.

According to the official document information of the Monad ICO published by Coinbase, this issuance becomes the first case where a large institution fully discloses the list of market makers, the scale of funds, and the execution period.The document states that the issuer MF Services (BVI) Ltd. has signed token lending agreements with five market-making institutions, specifically including: CyantArb (50 million MON, 1 month), Auros (30 million MON, 1 month), Galaxy (30 million MON, 1 month), GSR (30 million MON, 1 month), and Wintermute (20 million MON, 1 year).Short-term agreements can be renewed monthly, and the third-party monitoring agency Coinwatch will be responsible for verifying the token usage and idle balances of the aforementioned market-making accounts.In addition, MF Services plans to utilize up to 0.20% of the initial supply of MON to provide initial liquidity support for certain decentralized trading platforms, in order to enhance the tradability and market stability of the token during its initial launch. This measure is included in the "ecological development" allocation section and is considered a short-term liquidity injection, which still bears the risk of DeFi market fluctuations.

According to the official document information of the Monad ICO released by Coinbase, this issuance becomes the first case where a large institution fully discloses the list of market makers, the scale of funds, and the execution period.The document states that the issuer MF Services (BVI) Ltd. has signed token lending agreements with five market-making institutions, specifically including: CyantArb (50 million MON, 1 month), Auros (30 million MON, 1 month), Galaxy (30 million MON, 1 month), GSR (30 million MON, 1 month), and Wintermute (20 million MON, 1 year). Short-term agreements can be renewed monthly, and the third-party monitoring agency Coinwatch will be responsible for verifying the token usage and idle balances of the aforementioned market-making accounts. In addition, MF Services plans to utilize up to 0.2% of the initial supply of MON to provide initial liquidity support for some decentralized trading platforms, aiming to enhance the tradability and market stability of the token in its early listing phase. This measure is included in the "ecological development" allocation section and is considered a short-term liquidity injection action, which still needs to bear the volatility risks of the DeFi market.

ChainCatcher news, the panoramic exchange Bitget announced the integration of the open-source autonomous market-making and arbitrage bot provider Hummingbot, creating a more efficient and professional trading path for high-frequency traders. The core of this collaboration lies in the fact that the Hummingbot platform has added the officially supported bitget_perpetual connector, allowing traders to deploy market-making, arbitrage, and derivatives trading strategies directly on the Bitget platform, enjoying professional-level stability and transparent pricing without the need to build an underlying technical architecture, significantly lowering the operational threshold for high-frequency trading.Regarding this collaboration, Michael Feng, co-founder and board member of the Hummingbot Foundation, stated: "Open-source algorithmic trading is a key pillar in driving the maturity of the crypto ecosystem. The partnership with Bitget not only provides our community with high-quality trading infrastructure support but will also continuously enhance market liquidity and trading execution standards through our collaboration, injecting momentum into the standardized development of the entire industry."

ChainCatcher message, according to the tracking data from the Web3 asset data platform RootData X, in the past 7 days, the DEX SushiSwap based on an automated market-making system has been the project with the most unfollows by top figures on X (Twitter). The new influential figures on X who have unfollowed this project include the well-known cryptocurrency trader Ansem (@blknoiz06).

ChainCatcher news, according to GlobeNewswire, cryptocurrency ETP issuer 21Shares has signed an ETP market-making fund platform agreement with Société Générale.Société Générale will support 21Shares' Bitcoin and Ethereum ETPs, including: ABTC, CBTC, AETH, CETH, by providing over-the-counter liquidity through major fund platforms in Germany and Eastern Europe.

ChainCatcher message, ZachXBT posted on platform X to remind that the current creator of the ZEUS Meme project previously operated a market-making company called Darkpool, which openly promoted behaviors such as manipulating charts and spoofing in its roadshow materials.ZachXBT pointed out that the project's historical background poses a clear risk of market manipulation, and investors should remain vigilant.

ChainCatcher message, James Wynn posted on the X platform and announced the address, attempting to raise funds to fight against the market-making group. He stated that if they win, everyone will be refunded at a 1:1 ratio.

ChainCatcher news, Kaito Al posted on the X platform revealing that on February 17, Kaito signed a market-making agreement with Web3Port and voluntarily terminated the transaction on February 27.This agreement was one of several market-making agreements Kaito reached around the TGE on February 20, aimed at supporting the stability of the initial trading price. Within less than a week, Kaito felt that Web3Port's execution deviated from the original intention and quickly decided to terminate the project.This incident occurred before the negative reports about Web3Port and the subsequent exchange investigation in March. Since the TGE, the Kaito Foundation has never sold any KAITO tokens. In fact, the Kaito Foundation has been a net buyer of the token through an ongoing buyback program.

ChainCatcher news, according to Ai Yi's monitoring, a suspected DWF Labs market-making address deposited 13.35 million MOVE (worth about 6.6 million USD) into Ceffu 11 hours ago. In the short term, these tokens will not flow into the market.

ChainCatcher message, the Solana Virtual Machine SOON Chinese community tweeted, "We have learned about a recent allegation against Web3port, claiming that it engaged in malicious market-making activities on Binance for one of its portfolio projects. It needs to be clarified that Web3port did participate in the COMMing SOON NFT minting like other community members, but there is no agreement between SOON and Web3port for market-making or any other services apart from participating in the NFT minting. We appreciate the community's efforts in pursuing transparency, and we want to assure everyone that SOON remains committed to fair and ethical practices."

ChainCatcher message, according to @ai_9684xtpa's monitoring, Amber Group should be the market maker for $BGB, with the address 0x79C...9ACB6 having received 15.36 million tokens from a multi-signature address two years ago for market making, which was worth 6.48 million dollars at that time and has now appreciated to 44.7 million dollars. However, this portion of market-making tokens has long been fully deposited into the Bitget exchange, and currently, there are few large transactions visible on-chain.

ChainCatcher news, according to FinanceFeeds, Horizon announced a partnership with China Merchants Securities (Hong Kong) to provide market-making solutions for virtual asset ETFs.It is reported that the virtual asset spot ETF will be listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for the first time in April 2024, offering investment opportunities in Bitcoin and Ethereum under the supervision of the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) of Hong Kong.

According to ChainCatcher news reported by The Block, Deutsche Bank will provide Keyrock with multi-currency accounts and foreign exchange services, enabling the digital asset company to optimize and expand its market-making and over-the-counter trading services. By integrating services into a single entity, Keyrock can reduce its counterparty and settlement risks, allowing Keyrock to expand its business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Asia-Pacific (APAC), and Latin America (LATAM).