By Maxim Moris, CEO and co-founder of Cicada, a Dubai-based MM company with 6 years of personal experience, 1,000+ projects, and 500+ exchange listings.
At least four of your target audiences look at your chart on the exchange every single day. Your community. The exchange itself. Investors. Everyday traders.
They all see the same numbers, and each of them uses those numbers to decide the fate of your project. Buy your token or sell it. List it or delist it. Trade it or walk past it. Invest in you or pass.
Most founders never even open these numbers. This is a breakdown of who's reading your market and what they find there.
Your Market Is a Storefront
In the previous article we covered how to read an order book. The next step is understanding who else is reading it, because your market is a storefront and everyone is looking at it.
Reader One: The Exchange
Start with the coldest reader. The exchange has no emotions. It doesn't believe in your mission, doesn't read your whitepaper, and doesn't follow your Twitter. It looks at numbers: spread, liquidity, volume, trade frequency. Everything your market maker is responsible for.
Based on those numbers, it acts. Good metrics get your pair promoted into featured lists, top gainers, and recommendations. Bad metrics start a different ladder:
A warning comes first
Then a move to the ST zone
If nothing changes, delisting
Most founders never think about delisting. They assume that once an exchange lists them, it's forever. It isn't. Almost every exchange measures every token's metrics daily and automatically.
Pairs with a wide spread and an empty book get removed, and delisting is almost always a verdict. The price drops, the community scatters, and other exchanges start looking at you with suspicion.
Reader Two: Traders and Arbitrageurs
Professional traders don't look at projects one by one. They scan thousands of pairs at once with algorithms, screeners, and bots, and your token either passes their filters or it doesn't.
A thin order book leaves no room to move, and every trade pushes the price against them. So normal traders simply walk past, and you lose the organic volume you wanted so badly.
A thin book does attract another type of player: hunters, the ones looking for markets they can manipulate. They find a liquidity gap, push the price with a single order, sweep the stop-losses, and buy back cheaper. To them your weak market is an opportunity.
Here's the paradox. A weak market repels the people you need and attracts the people who are dangerous to you. A healthy market works the other way around.
That's why it matters to choose a market maker who knows how to work with liquidity, and who does more than keep the minimum required amount at 2%.
Reader Three: Your Community
The most important participant in your market is your community. It's also the most demanding and the most emotional one.
Holders don't read the order book. Most of the time they just look at the price. They buy a token and the price slips on execution. Unpleasant. They see a vertical red candle out of nowhere and get scared. They go to the chat to ask what happened and find panic already there, because a hundred other people saw the same thing.
Nobody understands the mechanics, but everybody understands the feeling that something is wrong. A small share starts selling out of fear and pushes the price lower, and others join in.
A healthy market goes unnoticed by the community, and that's the best compliment a market can get. The chat is quiet, the candles are smooth, and the price behaves predictably. People calmly hold, calmly buy more, and calmly get on with their lives.
Panic doesn't come from a price drop on its own. It comes from a drop nobody can explain, and unexplainable drops are almost always holes in the order book.
Reader Four: Funds and Investors
The fourth reader is money. Funds, investors, and the angels of your next rounds.
When a fund considers a project with a tradable token, it opens more than the pitch deck. It opens the market and checks the same things we covered before. Is the volume real or painted.
What does the depth look like. What happened to the price on unlocks. How the market survived the last correction.
A sick market is a red flag on the same level as bad tokenomics, because a fund thinks about the exit before the entry. Without liquidity, their position is a suitcase without a handle. It can't be sold without crashing the price.
I've seen projects with a strong product lose funding rounds because of a dead market. I've also seen an average project with a textbook market close its round faster, because the investor looked at the order book and saw people who know what they're doing.
Your market is part of your due diligence whether you like it or not.
What This Means for a Founder
You can't show one storefront to some people and another to the rest. There's one order book. It's public, and it's read in real time around the clock. Each reader has their own question:
The exchange asks whether your pair deserves to stay and be promoted.
Traders ask whether it's worth entering at all.
Your community asks whether it's safe to keep holding.
Funds ask whether they can get out when they need to.
A market maker is much more than a set of bots placing orders. It's a professional team that keeps your storefront in order twenty-four hours a day and makes it attractive to all four readers at once.
The only person who can afford not to read their own market is the founder, and that usually costs a lot.
I'm Maxim Moris, Founder of Cicada Market Making. If you need help reviewing a contract before you sign - reach out. I personally review every incoming request together with the team.
Read more: Anatomy of a Healthy Market