Anchor liquidity for new market types: prediction markets, novel perp markets, RWAs. Launch instruments that receive proper liquidity care from day one.
Launching a new market category is harder than launching a new venue or a new token.
Most market makers decline these engagements or participate symbolically. The uncertainty is high, the adverse selection is asymmetric in the early hours, and the operational complexity is out of proportion to the short-run trading revenue.
Raven treats new-category launches as a specialist product. The firm has served as anchor for prediction market venues, new perps market categories, and other novel instrument types where the first market maker sets the quality baseline for the entire category.
Categories where Raven has operated as an anchor market maker for novel instrument launches.
Prediction verticals
Event contracts & markets
New prediction market categories: crypto price markets, election markets, sports, weather, macro events.
New perps markets
Novel underlying or structure
Perpetual futures on underlyings without existing spot markets, or with structurally different funding mechanics.
Emerging categories
What's next
Venues and product teams exploring new market categories: tokenized equities, regulated event contracts, cross-domain derivatives.
What makes new-category mandates viable... and why most firms avoid them.
01
No existing book to reference means pricing has to come from the market maker's models rather than from arbitrage against a liquid venue. Raven's systems are built to operate in that regime, not to fall back to it.
02
Raven runs a deliberately small number of active partnerships at any time. The counterparties we work with get direct attention from the team, not a templated integration and a quarterly check-in.
03
Raven has operated as anchor market maker for multiple novel-category launches across prediction markets, new perps verticals, and on-chain derivatives. It is a repeat discipline for the firm, not a first attempt.
01
A new market category is a type of tradeable instrument that is either new to a venue or new to the broader market. Recent examples include prediction markets, perpetuals on underlyings that didn't previously have them, tokenized real-world assets, and novel derivative structures built on top of existing assets. Categories like these go through a distinct early phase where the mechanics are being figured out in real time. Order book behavior, fair value discovery, hedging channels, and flow patterns are all unsettled. The liquidity that shows up first shapes how the category develops. For a venue launching a new category, the question is who provides that early liquidity and whether they treat it as a genuine line of business or as an experimental allocation.
02
Launching a new market without a dedicated liquidity provider is the same problem as launching a new venue with an empty book, only more pronounced. The instrument is unfamiliar, fair value is harder to establish, and early participants are more sensitive to execution quality because they're already taking on the uncertainty of a new market structure. If spreads are wide and depth is thin, the category stalls. Traders who tried it once leave with a poor impression. The feedback loop that turns a new instrument into a functioning market (more participants, more flow, better pricing) never kicks off. Anchor liquidity solves the coordination problem. A market maker willing to quote the category from day one gives early participants something to trade against, which produces the initial flow data the rest of the market uses to develop its own views.
03
The most common outcome is a slow stall rather than a dramatic failure. Early traders arrive, find the books thin and the spreads wide, and leave. The venue has low volume, which makes it unattractive to other market makers who might otherwise participate, which keeps liquidity thin. The category either dies quietly or limps along at a fraction of its potential, held open by a small set of persistent users. The reverse case (a category with real launch liquidity that builds momentum) is distinct enough that it's usually visible in the first month or two. Depth improves, spreads tighten, additional participants arrive, and volume grows steadily rather than stalling.The difference between the two outcomes is not always about the underlying demand for the category. It's often about whether the early liquidity was good enough to give the market a chance to develop. This is why the choice of launch partner is one of the higher-leverage decisions a venue makes when introducing a new category.
04
A few areas are attracting genuine attention. Prediction markets have moved from a niche to an area that major financial institutions are actively investing in. The category has real demand, clear regulatory progress in some jurisdictions, and market structures that reward systematic quoting. The early phase of the category is still underway, and who anchors liquidity on the venues that emerge will shape the sector. Perpetuals on underlyings that didn't previously have them like RWA assets, indices, or reference rates that were historically traded only through spot or traditional derivatives, are another area. The existing perp infrastructure is mature, but extending it to new underlyings creates pricing and hedging questions that are genuinely novel. Tokenized real-world assets are earlier in their development, but the direction of travel is clear. As the regulatory and infrastructure work matures, the category will need liquidity provision that bridges traditional and crypto-native market structures. Each of these sits in a different phase of the cycle, and each needs a different approach. What they share is that early liquidity decisions will shape how the categories develop over the next several years.
05
Before launch, the conversation tends to cover market parameters, expected flow patterns, risk framework, and commercial structure. Both sides bring information: the venue knows the category mechanics and the participants it expects; the market maker brings pattern recognition from similar launches and a view on what quoting will look like in practice. At launch, communication becomes more frequent. Flow data from the first days often produces surprises: participant mix, toxicity, and directional flow rarely match expectations exactly, and both sides need to adjust. Quoting parameters get tuned, venue parameters sometimes get adjusted, and the partnership develops a shared picture of how the category actually behaves. Over the following months, the communication cadence settles back to something closer to a standard engagement. But the first weeks are genuinely collaborative in a way that established categories rarely require.
If you're opening a new product category and need anchor liquidity willing to quote through the unsettled early period, a direct conversation is the fastest way to see whether there's a fit.
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