Anchor liquidity for new venues from day zero.
A new exchange opening with thin books, wide spreads, or pulled quotes sends an immediate signal to the market: the venue does not have anchor liquidity lined up. Traders migrate elsewhere, market makers hesitate to commit, and the opening days become the reputational baseline the venue has to overcome.
Anchor launch partnerships exist specifically to prevent that. The market maker commits to depth, spread, and uptime targets from minute one. The venue opens with real liquidity rather than a thin book waiting to be filled.
Raven runs these engagements as specialist launch mandates: structured, measured, and coordinated with the venue's product, engineering, and marketing timelines.
Dedicated launch engagements are measured against specific, agreed metrics.
Depth
Book liquidity
Defined depth at agreed distances from mid-price, quoted continuously. The venue opens with a visible, realistic order book rather than an empty one filled symbolically.
Spread
Quote width
Maximum spread widths negotiated per instrument and venue type. Tighter during normal conditions; widened within agreed bounds through volatility windows.
Uptime
Quote availability
Defined uptime commitments across the trading day. The book is there when traders arrive — and when volatility tests whether the market maker's systems hold.
Coordination
Operational alignment
Go-live timing coordinated with the venue's engineering, product, and marketing teams.
Launch partnerships are a different discipline. Raven is structured for them.
01
We built Raven as an HFT firm first and a market maker second. That order matters. The result is tighter spreads, and quotes that stay live when slower shops widen or pull.
02
When volatility spikes, most market makers step back from the book entirely. We don't. Staying present when liquidity thins out is when counterparties feel the difference most.
03
Raven has served as exclusive launch partner for various venues across CeFi, DeFi and Prediction Markets. Launch engagements are a recurring discipline, not a one-off.
01
New CeFi exchange launches, new DeFi venues coming online, and new market categories opening on existing venues. Raven has served as an exclusive launch partner for several prediction market venues and operates as the primary liquidity provider for various CeFi and DeFi product launches. Engagement structure varies by venue type, but the core model is the same: commit to depth, spread, and uptime from day zero, trading in its own name, with proprietary capital.
02
These are often positioned as alternatives but they solve different problems. Anchor liquidity is a direct commitment from a professional market maker to provide specified quoting from day one. It produces predictable, high-quality liquidity at launch, with the trade-off that it involves a bilateral commercial arrangement and a specific counterparty. Incentive programs are open structures that pay any qualifying participant for providing liquidity, usually through rebates or token distributions. They can attract a broader set of participants over time and create organic liquidity that compounds. The trade-off is that they don't produce guaranteed launch-day quality, and the liquidity they attract is often less committed than anchor relationships. Most serious exchange launches use both. Anchor market makers provide the foundation that makes the venue functional from the first minute. Incentive programs run in parallel to attract additional participants and build the broader liquidity base over the following months. Venues that rely only on incentive programs at launch often experience the stall pattern described earlier.
03
A new venue goes live with empty order books. Without someone posting consistent two-sided quotes, spreads are wide, fills are unreliable, and the first traders who arrive leave unimpressed. That first impression shapes how the platform gets talked about for months. A launch market maker provides the resting liquidity that makes the product usable from day one. Tight spreads, reliable depth, quotes that stay live when markets move. For a venue, this is the difference between a launch that builds momentum and one that stalls waiting for organic liquidity that never fully materializes.
04
Earlier is usually better, and earlier than most venues initially expect. The work that happens before launch tends to matter more than venues anticipate. Market parameters, matching logic, fee structures, and API design all benefit from input from the market makers who will be quoting on the venue, and changes are much easier to make before launch than after. Integration, testing, and staged runs against the matching engine take time, and compressing that timeline introduces execution risk that shows up at the worst possible moment. Two to three months before launch is a reasonable target for beginning the conversation with potential anchor partners, with longer timelines for venues that have unusual technical requirements or unconventional market structures. Exchanges that wait until a few weeks before launch typically have fewer options and less room to shape the engagement. For venues that have already launched without adequate anchor liquidity, it's rarely too late to improve the situation. But it's usually harder than doing it right the first time.
05
Launch mandates typically transition into ongoing market-making coverage, with parameters evolving as the venue's flow profile matures. The launch phase has its own commitments and structure; the post-launch phase has its own. The transition between the two is defined in the mandate rather than left implicit.
If your venue needs anchor liquidity that holds up on day zero and through the first volatility windows, we can discuss what a launch mandate looks like for your product and timeline.
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