EchoTrade is a crypto market maker founded in 2023 that quotes on more than 90 centralized and decentralized exchanges for over 100 active projects, on a retainer-only model. In three years it has supported more than 2,000 token launches. This is how the company was built, and the five things its desk tells every project before a listing.
What separates EchoTrade from most other market making firms is its approach to the people inside the company, and the level of professionalism it demands from them before anyone gets near a client's order book.
That is not how the category usually works. Market making is normally sold as software. The engagement is an algorithm, the people running it are overhead, and the pitch is about latency and infrastructure. EchoTrade built it the other way round: identify the best people in a very small niche, whether or not they were looking to move, hold them to a standard, and let what the company can offer follow from who is on the desk.
Part one: the company
EchoTrade was founded in 2023. The desk quotes on more than 90 centralized and decentralized exchanges, works with over 100 active projects, and has supported more than 2,000 token launches. The team is over 40 people across trading, business development, sales and marketing, and more than 20 of them are traders.
The operating principle behind those numbers is simple enough to state in one line: deliver the highest quality of trading service the desk is capable of, and accept what that costs. In practice it has meant more traders per book than the economics strictly require, quantitative research and market microstructure analysis sitting upstream of the trading, and infrastructure built in-house rather than licensed. Each of those is a more expensive choice than the alternative most market makers take. The bet is that service quality is what compounds in this business, because clients renew on it and exchanges notice it.
Some checkable things about where that has got to. EchoTrade is an official Liquidity Partner of MEXC, and quotes as a market maker across the rest of the tier 1 venues, including Binance, Bybit, OKX, KuCoin and Gate.io. It is an official sponsor of TOKEN2049 Singapore. It runs four service lines: market making, launch support, exchange compliance review and treasury building. And it appears between first and fifth in every third-party market maker roundup it is listed in, alongside Wintermute, GSR, Keyrock and Amber Group: First of five at Lunar Strategy, Second of ten at AP Collective, Third of eight at Techtonic, Fifth of six at LuvKaizen.
From a standing start in 2023, that makes EchoTrade one of the fastest growing market makers in the space, if not the fastest. The growth came from a small number of decisions made early, and one of them matters more than the rest.
The model, stated plainly
There are two ways market makers get paid in this industry, and it is worth knowing which one you are dealing with.
The retainer model is a flat monthly fee for a defined scope, billed in advance, typically between $2,500 and $10,000 a month depending on how many venues are in play. The token loan model has no fee: the desk borrows between 0.5% and 2% of token supply for a term of twelve to twenty-four months, provides liquidity with its own capital, and is compensated through an option to keep those tokens at a preset price at the end.
EchoTrade works on a retainer only. It does not take token loans, call options or profit share, and it never takes custody of a project's tokens. The reason is the incentive. Under a loan, what pays the desk is where the token price sits at expiry. Under a retainer, what pays the desk is the state of the order book. The second is the thing a market maker actually controls, and it is the thing a client is actually buying. The two structures priced side by side, including what the option costs a treasury at expiry, are in retainer vs token loan.
For a project comparing desks, the model is the first thing to establish and the fastest way to narrow a shortlist, because it determines who is exposed to what. What EchoTrade covers, and the scope it quotes against, is set out across its services.
That choice has a cost. A project with no cash before its token generation event cannot be a client, and EchoTrade does not solve that by taking a loan instead. Some launches get turned down. Others get scoped down to fewer venues than the founder came in wanting.
Who the desk works with
Mostly pre-launch teams, and tokens already trading that need their books held to the exchange's thresholds. What almost all of them have in common is that they arrive needing several things at once, and the market side is only one of them.
Which is why EchoTrade maintains a network of more than 40 partners across the rest of the launch stack: public relations and marketing, legal, tokenomics, audit, listing support. That network accounts for part of the growth. A project preparing for a listing needs four or five things at once, and usually has no way of telling which providers are any good. The desk handles the market side and points at people it has worked with repeatedly for the rest.
What makes EchoTrade different from other market makers?
The traders, and the standard they are held to. Most market making firms compete on technology and staff the desk as thinly as the software allows. EchoTrade hired the strongest traders and quants it could find in a small niche, put more of them on each book, and built what the company offers around them. Two parts to that, both deliberate.
Quants, not just traders. The desk was built around people who could do the research as well as the execution: market microstructure analysis, quoting models, low-latency infrastructure written in-house rather than licensed. That is a different hire from someone who can operate a market making bot, and a much harder one to find.
Enough traders to actually cover the books. More than 20 traders manage client order books around the clock, and during a launch window up to three can be assigned to a single asset. The category norm is to sell software and staff it thinly, because staffing is the expensive part. This is the opposite trade. It is the reason a client's book has someone looking at it at three in the morning when a venue behaves unexpectedly, rather than a script running unattended until somebody notices.
What it cost. That search is slow, and most of it was not recruitment in the usual sense. The pool of people who can do quantitative research and run a live book under pressure is small, and the strongest of them are rarely on the market, so hiring meant going after people who already had jobs and giving them a reason to leave. That is the constraint most desks hit when they try to grow. It is also the reason the company grew the way it did, which is the healthiest way: clients who are happy with the service stay, and tell other founders.
What did that make possible?
Three things, all downstream of the same decision.
Coverage across more than 90 exchanges. Integrating widely is a staffing problem before it is a technical one, because every venue added is another book that somebody has to watch. It matters because the large majority of the 2,000+ launches EchoTrade has supported opened on a tier 2 or tier 3 venue rather than a tier 1. A desk that only quotes on the top five cannot serve those projects on the day it counts.
Relationships with the exchanges. Integrating with a venue takes a few weeks of engineering. Getting to the point where the exchange knows your desk and answers the phone takes years, and it is done by people. The practical result is that onboarding a new client runs four to six weeks rather than twelve, because the integration and the relationship are both already there.
Books that hold their thresholds. Exchanges measure depth, spread and uptime continuously, per venue, for as long as a token is listed. MEXC's published monitoring criteria flag a token whose average daily spread exceeds 2% for fifteen consecutive days, and a token that stays outside the thresholds can be removed three days after the warning is applied. Software can hold a book inside those limits on a normal day. Launch day is not a normal day. Volumes jump, spreads move, and quotes need adjusting faster in the first hour than at any other point in a token's life. That is why up to three traders sit on one asset during a launch window.
What advice does EchoTrade give projects before a launch?
We asked the desk what it tells projects in the weeks before a listing. Five things came back, and they said the same five come up on almost every first call across more than 2,000 launches.
1. Budget the order book, not the listing fee
Every listing has four costs: the fee, the inventory positioned on that venue, the market making scope, and the ongoing obligation to hold depth and spread inside the exchange's thresholds. The fee is the number founders remember and it is rarely the largest, and the ranges by tier are set out in how much it costs to list a token on an exchange. The other three continue after launch week, so the budget that matters covers six months of the market side. EchoTrade publishes actual numbers for that side too, which almost nobody in the category does, in its breakdown of how much a crypto market maker costs.
2. Fund two books properly rather than five badly
Depth does not transfer between exchanges. Each venue runs its own order book, and each one measures its obligations on that book alone. So divide the six-month market budget by what one venue costs to support properly, and the answer is your venue count. Spreading the same money across five books does not produce five markets. Ask any desk you are talking to for a per-venue quote rather than a package, because a package price hides which books are actually being supported, and any desk that cannot break its quote down by venue is quoting you an average.
3. Bring the desk in four to six weeks before the listing
By the time a token opens for trading, most of a market maker's work is already done: venue integration, inventory positioning, quoting configuration, launch coordination. That work takes four to six weeks, which is also why market making is billed from onboarding rather than from the listing date. Teams that leave it late compress the preparation, and compressed preparation is the most reliable predictor of a difficult first week.
One thing worth settling in that same window: get the depth, spread and uptime targets into the agreement, per venue, with a fixed reporting schedule. A desk that will commit to numbers in writing is a different proposition from one that will not, and it is the cheapest piece of diligence available to a founder.
4. Announce after the book is funded, not before
Launch day has an order of operations. Inventory confirmed the day before. Quoting live and tested before the pair opens. The announcement going out once the book is showing depth, so the first traders who arrive see a market rather than a gap. Traders do not distinguish between a thin book and an untradeable token. They form the judgment once.
5. Hand over the unlock schedule at onboarding, and keep capital back for it
The vesting schedule is public, so the market can read it, and it usually starts pricing the first unlock days before the tokens actually move. A desk that sees the schedule at onboarding rather than the week it happens can position inventory for it. A desk that finds out late is reacting.
The related mistake is budgeting only for the book at launch. Sustained sell pressure consumes the capital that is sitting in the book absorbing it, so a project with nothing held back has a thinning book at exactly the moment it needs a deeper one. Reserve capital for top-ups belongs in the launch budget, not in a later conversation.
EchoTrade · advice given to projects before a listing
What comes next
More partner designations with tier 1 exchanges, and deeper coverage on the venues where most listings actually open rather than only the ones with the largest names. The end of that road is projects graduating upwards: Binance's listing process is a multi-stage submission with a screening the exchange describes as rigorous, and a token arrives there in a far stronger position with six months of clean depth, spread and uptime data behind it than it does applying cold. Getting projects to that point is most of the work.
The hiring continues to be the constraint. It is also the reason there is anything to write about.
About EchoTrade
EchoTrade is a crypto market making firm founded in 2023. It works with token projects across more than 90 centralized and decentralized exchanges, with more than 20 traders managing order books, supporting over 100 active projects and more than 2,000 token launches. EchoTrade operates on a retainer-only model and does not take custody of client tokens. It is an official Liquidity Partner of MEXC. echo-trade.io
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored article and is for informational purposes only. It does not reflect the views of Crypto Daily, nor is it intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, or financial advice.
* This article was originally published here
