Market making is the practice of continuously placing buy and sell orders for an asset so that other people can always trade it at a fair, predictable price. A market maker quotes both sides of the book, a bid (the price it will buy at) and an ask (the price it will sell at), and keeps the gap between them, the spread, tight. In return for providing this liquidity, the market maker captures the spread on trades that cross it.
In crypto, the same idea applies whether your token trades on a centralized exchange orderbook or an on-chain liquidity pool. A healthy market has a tight spread, real depth on both sides, and steady activity. An unhealthy one has a wide spread, an almost-empty book, and a chart that lurches on every small trade.
Most newly listed tokens launch with thin orderbooks and little trading activity. That creates three problems: buyers see a wide spread and walk away, a single sell can crater the price, and exchanges and data trackers read the market as low quality. Market making fixes the mechanics underneath, so the market behaves like a healthy one.
It also matters for visibility. Listing teams and aggregators like CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko screen for consistent depth, tight spreads, and meaningful 24-hour volume. Sustained healthy markets help your token score better on those listings and look credible to new buyers, which is exactly what we cover on each exchange page.
These two get confused constantly. Liquidity is about depth and tightness, how much can be bought or sold near the current price without moving it much. Volume is about activity, how much actually changes hands over a period of time.
You want both. Liquidity makes your market usable; volume makes it look alive and helps with discovery. Coinner's Liquidity Bot provides depth and tight spreads, with steady volume building as a byproduct of continuous quoting.
On a centralized exchange, market making happens on the orderbook: the bot connects through an API key (trade-only, withdrawals disabled) and continuously posts and cancels bids and asks to hold your target spread and depth. This is what runs on venues like MEXC, Gate.io, KuCoin, and the other supported exchanges.
On-chain, there is no central orderbook, trading happens against liquidity pools on DEXs. Here, market making means automating buy and sell swaps on DEX pools from wallets you control, for steady on-chain activity and visibility on trackers like DexScreener and DexTools. That is what On-chain Market Making does across chains like Solana, Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Base.
The market-making industry has a reputation problem because a lot of it is opaque. When you evaluate a provider or tool, look for a few things:
Custody: you should keep control of your funds. With a self-serve model you connect trade-only API keys or fund a wallet you own, so nobody can withdraw your assets. Transparency: you should be able to see exactly what the bot is doing. Control: you set the spread, depth, and risk limits, and you can stop at any time. Honest pricing: transparent fees beat five-figure retainers and vague "we'll handle it" promises. We go deeper on how we secure all of this on our security page.
Strip away the jargon and a market maker bot runs one loop, over and over. It reads a reference price, works out where your bid and ask should sit given the spread you configured, places those orders, then watches. When the reference price moves, or an order fills, or a configured time passes, it cancels and replaces the quotes at the new levels. That cycle repeats for as long as the bot is running.
Everything else is guardrails around that loop. An inventory limit stops the bot accumulating more of your token than you are willing to hold. A volatility control widens the spread or pauses quoting when the market moves faster than your settings allow. An order-size cap keeps any single quote small enough that a fill does not blow through your budget. You set each of these before the bot goes live, and you can change them or stop the bot at any time.
On-chain the loop looks different because there is no book to quote into. Instead the bot executes swaps from wallets you fund, within transaction-size, timing, and total-budget limits you set. The guardrails serve the same purpose: bounding what the automation can do with your money.
These are two genuinely different things, and the confusion costs token teams real money. A market making firm is a trading desk you hire. You typically sign a monthly retainer, and in many arrangements you also lend the desk a quantity of your token plus a call option on it. The desk trades with its own strategy, on its own infrastructure, and reporting back to you is a courtesy rather than a guarantee.
A market maker bot is software you operate. You keep your tokens, you set the spread and depth, and you can see and stop everything it does. There is no token loan, no option, and no discretionary trading by a third party. The tradeoff is that you are the one making the decisions, which is a real responsibility.
The honest split: if you are a large cap that needs a desk quoting across a dozen venues with committed capital, hire a firm. If you are a token team that needs a healthy, tradable market on the venues you are actually listed on, a bot does that job for a fraction of the cost and without giving anyone else control of your supply. That is the case Coinner is built for, venue by venue, on the exchanges and chains pages.
There are three separate costs and they get conflated constantly. First, the tool or service fee: a retainer if you hire a desk, a subscription if you run a bot. Second, the working capital: the inventory that has to sit on the exchange for the bot to quote with. That capital is not spent, it is deployed, but it is committed and exposed to price movement. Third, exchange fees on the trades that fill, offset in part by maker rebates where a venue offers them.
The number people forget is the second one. A bot with no inventory cannot quote. Decide how much base and quote you are prepared to commit to each pair before you evaluate anything else, because that figure, not the subscription, usually dominates the real cost.
Quoting too tight, too early. A very tight spread on a thin market means the bot gets picked off by anyone with better information. Start conservative and tighten as depth builds.
Confusing volume with liquidity. High volume on a thin book is not a healthy market, it is a fragile one. Depth is what makes a market usable.
Funding only one side. A bot with base tokens but no quote currency can only sell. Both sides need inventory or the quoting is one-legged.
Setting it and forgetting it. Parameters that were right at launch are usually wrong three weeks later. Review spread, depth, and inventory limits when volatility or listing conditions change.
Coinner is built so token projects can run professional market making themselves, affordably and transparently, with full control and no custody of your funds. Sign up for a free account, and the setup wizard connects an exchange or wallet and sets up your first bot, typically live in about 30 minutes. Your first bot runs free for 3 days; after that you pick a plan in the app under Billing and pay in crypto. Our team can help whenever you want it.
Three products cover the common needs: Liquidity Bot for orderbook market making and volume, Sell Bot for exiting a position gradually without crashing the price, and On-chain Market Making for automated swaps and visibility on DEXs. See it per venue on the exchanges and chains pages.
The terms that come up most often when a token team starts evaluating liquidity, in plain language.