Market making is a huge but inefficient industry in crypto. Exchanges and token issuers pay quantitative hedge funds millions of dollars per year to provide liquidity.
We introduce liquidity mining, a digital marketplace for liquidity, powered by the Hummingbot open source software that lets anyone run a market making bot (read the whitepaper).
Simulations show that users can earn 10-50% annually while providing the same level of liquidity as a hedge fund. This results in 5-10x cost savings for exchanges and token issuers.
We are excited to announce our 8 launch partners that represent a broad cross-section of the crypto market (centralized exchanges, DEX protocols, and token issuers) who will create liquidity mining campaigns that reward their communities for market making.
This summary provides an overview of the Liquidity Mining whitepaper, which introduced a novel approach to liquidity provision in digital asset markets.
The document explores the historical context behind market making, the state of crypto market making in 2019, compensation models, and proposing an innovative liquidity mining model aimed at optimizing the market making process.
Two months ago, in conjunction with our friends from Harmony Protocol, we started an experimental program called $ONE Makers to see if ordinary individuals using Hummingbot to run market making bots could effectively provide the same level of liquidity as professional market makers.
Both we and Harmony viewed $ONE Makers as an experiment. In particular, we wanted to answer the following questions:
Could people actually make money or would they get destroyed by more sophisticated players?
How many people are needed to effectively replace a professional market maker?
It's been just over two months since the launch of the $ONE Makers liquidity bounty program. With intense competition, bounty hunters have diligently worked to climb the ranks on our newly launched, real-time leaderboard. The trading volume for $ONE in July and August totaled an impressive USD $5.98 million.
In this post, we're excited to introduce Dominator008, who clinched the #1 spot in the August reward period and has earned over 10 ETH in the previous period. Dominator008, a software engineer by profession with a deeply technical background, joined $ONE Makers in mid-July. He is currently utilizing hummingbot to trade various pairs, including ONE.
Three weeks have passed since the launch of the $ONE Makers liquidity bounty program in collaboration with Harmony Protocol. We've witnessed $ONE's trading volume soar beyond 130 million. Bounty hunters are vying fiercely to ascend our leaderboard.
In this edition, we spotlight David Salter, who currently holds the #6 rank (as of July 22, 2019) and has accrued approximately 1ETH in bounty rewards. Boasting a solid technical background, David has extensive experience in the telecommunications and finance sectors. His journey into cryptocurrency trading began in July 2017, and he now consistently achieves 0.5%-3% profit per trade using Hummingbot during his trading sessions.
Join us as we delve into David's experiences and gather insights from his trading strategies!
A new approach to solving one of the biggest problems that face issuers of digital tokens: liquidity.
For the first Liquidity Bounty, we have partnered with our friends at Harmony Protocol, a Layer 1 blockchain project with key innovations in sharding and network transport, founded by a highly technical team from Google, Apple, and Amazon.
Liquidity offers a major benefit of price discovery: ensuring market prices are fair. When purchasing liquid assets like Apple shares from platforms like Robinhood or E*TRADE, you're assured that reselling them won't lead to significant losses. Conversely, in less liquid markets, such as certain crypto markets, you might encounter a situation where the buying price is 20% higher than the selling price, a phenomenon known as the bid-ask spread.
Here's the story of how we created one of the first tokenized hedge funds, shut it down after reaching an SEC settlement, and are now building an open source market making bot!
This post is adapted from a 2019 podcast with Michael Feng, co-founder of Hummingbot.