2/ Disclaimer: we have never accepted tokens or call options to "be the MM." We just run our usual strategies. A big part of the problem is MMs inflating the difficulty of their job. It’s a lucrative business to rip off new token projects. Some firms have killed it in this niche

3/ For context, we often do double digit % market share seconds after listing with some light tuning of our usual strategies. If we specialized in new listings, we could easily do "designated market maker" level market share without getting paid extra.

4/ How does it work? The trick to new listings is to build a system around light manual intervention. $ARB was a good example. The exchanges did not coordinate with listing times, and in this case listed before they announced they would. Just bear market things.

5/ It’s tough to figure out sizing and which sources of external data are reliable in these chaotic environments. A bit of human touch goes a long way. For example for $ARB, we quickly noticed we were printing money, so we doubled sizes and turned up aggression accordingly.

6/ If you only run a fully automated system with models trained on historical data, you might have to sit out new listings. In this case, it can be helpful to think of new listings as a somewhat distinct regime. Depending on framework, you can e.g. train separate models.

7/ Another consideration is that there aren’t many new listings to get used to these days. We were forged in the bull market, back when Coinbase’s motto was “a coin a day keeps the SEC away,” so we're lucky to have built up solid intuition for these conditions.

8/ With so few listings these days, I’d view the process as a multi-armed bandit problem, strongly informed by your own priors. It can help to look at times of high volatility (e.g., just now with the twitter $DOGE thing) as inspiration for market dynamics.

9/ In conclusion, MMing new listings isn’t as hard or risky as MMs want you to believe. They spin tales of “inventory risk” or whatever, but a new listing with extreme retail flow is the stuff of HFT dreams. There's a reason Citadel pays for order flow, not the other way around

10/ I hope these ideas are useful to people who want to trade new listings and token projects navigating this tricky space. We’re not in the business of scamming projects and never will be. We’ll continue to provide day 0 liquidity for new listings, and you don’t need to pay us.

@chameleon_jeff $ARB was an opposite of a good example. Huge volumes from the start - it's a MMs dream. Now try the opposite - new listing and no volume or only one sided toxic flow. GL with that

@miquel_malaga By one sided toxic flow you mean the team wants to dump? If the team needs to sell a bunch on listing they can go OTC directly instead of the whole MM smoke and mirrors. Of course that's more transparent and looks bad...