Market making

Crypto market making is the practice of continuously placing buy and sell orders for a token or trading pair on an exchange, ensuring that traders can always enter and exit positions at fair prices. Market makers maintain tight bid-ask spreads and deep order books, which reduces slippage, stabilizes pricing, and creates a healthy trading environment. Institutional market makers like Raven use proprietary algorithmic trading systems to manage pricing and risk across multiple exchanges simultaneously, operating 24/7. Without dedicated market makers, most tokens would suffer from wide spreads, thin liquidity, and erratic price movements that drive away traders and investors.

Token projects need market makers for several critical reasons. First, most exchanges require a minimum level of liquidity before they will list a token, and maintaining that liquidity is often a condition of continued listing. Second, thin liquidity leads to high slippage, which means investors get poor execution prices and lose confidence in the token. Third, consistent market making improves price discovery, making the token's price more accurately reflect real supply and demand. Finally, deep order books signal a healthy, active market, which attracts more traders and investors over time. Raven works with projects from pre-TGE through post-listing to ensure liquidity is in place.

Prediction market platforms looking for institutional liquidity can reach out through our partnership inquiry form. Raven works with platforms to design liquidity provision programs tailored to their specific situation, whether that means bootstrapping deep liquidity for a brand new platform launch, strengthening order books across specific contract categories on an established venue, or providing dedicated market making for high-profile events. Our firm is backed by Hack VC, Wintermute Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and CMCC Global. We currently provide liquidity on Polymarket, Kalshi, and Gemini Predictions, and are continuously evaluating new platforms as the prediction market ecosystem grows.

Raven is active on over 30 centralized exchanges including Binance, Coinbase, OKX, Bybit, Bitget, Crypto.com, Gate.io, KuCoin, Gemini, Bitvavo, BitMEX, Arkham, and RevolutX, among others. Beyond centralized exchanges, Raven also provides liquidity on decentralized derivatives platforms including GRVT, hibachi, and Bluefin, as well as RFQ networks. The firm operates across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, BNB Chain, Avalanche, and other blockchain ecosystems.

A service-level agreement (SLA) in market making defines the specific performance commitments between the market maker and the client. This typically includes targets for bid-ask spread width, order book depth at various price levels, uptime percentage, and response time during volatile market conditions. SLAs provide token projects and exchanges with accountability and transparency, ensuring the market maker delivers consistent, measurable results rather than vague promises. Raven's engagements are typically structured around SLAs to ensure both parties have clear expectations and performance benchmarks.