Market making is the act of simultaneously creating buy and sell orders for an asset in a market. By doing so, a market maker acts as a liquidity provider, facilitating other market participants to trade by giving them the ability to fill the market maker's orders. Traditionally, market making industry has been dominated by highly technical quantitative hedge funds and trading firms who have the infrastructure and intelligence to deploy sophisticated algorithms at scale.

Market makers play an important role in providing liquidity to financial markets, especially in the highly fragmented cryptocurrency industry. While large professional market makers fight over the most actively traded pairs on the highest volume exchanges, there exists a massive long tail of smaller markets who also need liquidity: tokens outside the top 10, smaller exchanges, decentralized exchanges, and new blockchains.

In addition, the prohibitively high payment demanded by pro market makers, coupled with lack of transparency and industry standards, creates perverse incentives for certain bad players to act maliciously via wash trading and market manipulation. For more discussion on the liquidity problem, please check out this blog post.