By 2025, the question for new and growing token projects is no longer whether they should work with a crypto market maker, but how quickly they can secure one. This shift has less to do with trend-following and far more to do with how the crypto market itself has evolved. As liquidity became a stronger determinant of crypto exchange listings, perception, and execution quality, professional market makers turned from optional partners into essential infrastructure. Let’s dive into actual reasons for why crypto market makers are increasingly dominating trading of cryptocurrencies, starting with unpacking their core role on the market.
What is Crypto Market Making and How Does It Work?
The role of market makers is clearly becoming both more visible and more misunderstood. Popular narratives often reduce them to “bots that move prices,” but in practice, a professional crypto market maker functions much more like the liquidity engine of the market. Their job is not to predict price direction but to ensure that trading can happen smoothly at all times, especially when conditions become volatile.
At the core of their work is continuous two-sided quoting: posting firm bid and ask orders across centralized exchanges (CEXs), decentralized exchanges (DEXs), and increasingly, derivatives platforms. By maintaining order flow at tight spreads, crypto market makers create the trading depth that allows both retail and institutional participants to enter and exit positions with minimal slippage. This depth is what keeps markets orderly, prevents erratic price jumps, and enables larger trades to clear without destabilizing the book.
But modern crypto market making services extend far beyond quoting. Crypto market makers also engage in dynamic inventory and risk management, balancing positions across dozens of venues and instruments. In a derivatives-heavy environment, where perpetuals and futures drive the majority of price discovery, this often includes hedging spot exposure with derivatives, arbitraging cross-venue price discrepancies, and keeping cryptocurrency prices coherent across global markets.
These functions are now essential because crypto trading is done around the clock, reacts instantly to sentiment shifts, and spans hundreds of pretty fragmented liquidity clusters.
For blockchain project teams, crypto market makers serve an even broader role. They help newly listed tokens avoid the chaotic conditions that often arise in thin markets: wide spreads, irregular gaps between orders, or sharp price swings from even moderate trade sizes. They also ensure that price formation remains smooth and credible across listings, improving user experience and building trust during the critical early stages of a project’s lifecycle. Many crypto market making firms now also provide liquidity-as-a-service that ties into tokenomics, unlock schedules, exchange onboarding, and long-term liquidity planning, blurring the line between trading partner and strategic advisor.
This combination of technical market operations, real-time risk management, and launch support is what defines the modern crypto market maker. They are not speculators betting on token direction, but infrastructure providers ensuring that a token’s market is stable, functional, and liquid at the moments investors need it most.
Why Nearly Every Crypto Project Now Works With Market Makers
With the knowledge about the role of crypto market makers, let’s now address the core question: why does every blockchain project now partners with a crypto market maker? This matter is multi-faceted, with various reasons taking place.
1. Liquidity Quality Has Become a Listing and Capital Filter
Reports from CoinGecko and other analytical agencies published throughout 2025 highlight that crypto exchanges increasingly treat liquidity depth, spreads, and slippage as a proxy for project maturity. Tokens that cannot demonstrate “ready” liquidity struggle to secure top-tier listings or attract institutional capital. As a result, many teams turn to market makers to meet these expectations from day one.
2. Derivatives-Dominated Market Is Too Complex for Projects to Manage Alone
With futures and perpetuals now accounting for roughly 75-80% of all crypto exchange trading volume in 2025, price discovery happens across multiple venues and instruments simultaneously. This structure demands continuous arbitrage, hedging, and cross-market alignment — activities that require sophisticated systems, 24/7 risk management, and multi-platform connectivity. Crypto market makers are the only players equipped to maintain coherent pricing across CEXs, DEXs, and derivatives markets, making them indispensable for any token hoping to trade smoothly.
3. Illiquidity Has Become a Direct Risk Factor for Manipulation and Volatility
Kaiko’s 2025 reporting shows a consistent pattern: thinly traded tokens are far more exposed to price manipulation attempts, chaotic gaps, and sudden spread blowouts. Liquidity can evaporate instantly during stress events, especially for smaller-cap assets. Projects therefore use market makers not just to create depth, but to defensively reduce the probability of disorderly trading, reputational damage, and price shocks.
4. Liquidity Has Been “Productized” into Liquidity-as-a-Service
Crypto market makers now offer far more than passive quoting. Many provide bundled services covering token launch strategy, exchange introductions, inventory management, unlock planning, and synthetic hedging. This turns liquidity into a turnkey service layer that aligns with tokenomics and TGE milestones, making market making partnerships a built-in component of modern token launches.
5. Competitive Pressure and Signaling Effects Make Market Makers Unavoidable
Since most top Web3 projects already work with major crypto market makers, not having one signals that a token may suffer from thin liquidity, high slippage, or elevated manipulation risk. Exchanges and investors notice this. As a result, even fundamentally strong teams adopt MM partnerships simply to avoid negative perception and stay competitive in an ecosystem where liquidity is interpreted as credibility.
Taken together, these forces explain why almost every serious crypto project in 2025 engages a market maker. The market’s structure: derivatives-heavy, institutionally influenced, and highly sensitive to liquidity shocks means that consistent, professional crypto liquidity provision is no longer a nice-to-have. It is a prerequisite for functioning markets and for being taken seriously in a rapidly maturing industry.
Major Crypto Market Makers of 2025
A relatively small group of highly specialized trading firms had come to define the global liquidity infrastructure of the crypto market.
One of the central figures of this landscape is DWF Labs, which is recognized as one of the most active and biggest crypto market makers in the industry. Since its founding in 2022, the firm has expanded rapidly by combining high-frequency trading expertise with a broader ecosystem approach.
Beyond maintaining deep liquidity across more than 60 major trading venues, DWF Labs manages a vast portfolio of over 1000 of Web3 projects through a mix of spot and derivatives market making, venture investment, crypto OTC deals, and targeted sector funds such as its AI Agent Fund and Liquid Fund. Its work with leading projects and networks like World Liberty Financial (WLFI), TON, Tron, Algorand, NEAR, and Kava reflects a strategy focused not only on stabilizing markets but accelerating project growth across diverse segments of Web3, from DeFi and SocialFi to DePIN, gaming, and memecoins.
Alongside DWF Labs, several other firms play essential roles in shaping crypto liquidity. Wintermute remains one of the most advanced algorithmic market makers, supplying highly automated liquidity across both centralized and decentralized markets. Its infrastructure enables tight spreads and efficient execution at scale, making it a foundational participant in major trading venues. GSR Markets, one of the earliest institutional players in digital assets, continues to stand out for its quantitative, risk-driven approach. With a focus on sustainable liquidity and long-term market health, GSR provides structured products and bespoke liquidity solutions that are widely relied upon by exchanges, token issuers, and institutional funds.
Cumberland brings a more traditional-finance heritage to crypto. As a subsidiary of DRW, it offers institutional-grade pricing, bilateral liquidity, and sophisticated OTC execution that supports the largest and most complex trades in the market. Meanwhile, Jump Crypto combines deep experience from traditional high-frequency trading with active participation in Web3 development. In addition to providing liquidity across spot and derivatives venues, Jump is known for contributing infrastructure, tooling, and research that support the broader blockchain ecosystem.
Together, these firms anchor the liquidity environment of 2025, making digital asset markets more resilient, keep pricing coherent across fragmented venues, and enable new tokens to trade in an orderly way from the moment they reach exchanges.
Closing Thoughts
The rise of crypto market makers such as DWF Labs, Wintermute, and others is not a story about consolidation of power, but about the natural maturation of a market that has outgrown its early, fragmented phase. With crypto trading becoming continuous, global, derivatives-driven, and increasingly institutional, liquidity stopped being an emergent byproduct of speculation and became a core requirement for market stability. Market makers stepped into that gap by professionalizing how liquidity is created, maintained, and defended.
The role of crypto market makers is likely to deepen rather than diminish. With the advancing regulation, growing institutional participation, and market structure continuing to converge with global financial standards, crypto liquidity provision will become even more specialized and strategic. For the foreseeable future, digital asset markets will not be shaped solely by narratives or innovation, but by the quiet, continuous work of firms ensuring that when someone wants to trade, the market is there to meet them.
