- A Novora study of 150 crypto protocols found fewer than 1% publicly disclose their market-making arrangements.
- Decentralized liquidity platform Meteora was the sole exception, publishing details in its 2025 Annual Token Holder Report.
- The findings expose what the firm calls “the single most consequential transparency gap” in an industry handling billions in daily volume.
Here’s a number that should bother anyone trading tokens: out of 150 major crypto protocols studied by advisory firm Novora, exactly one—Meteora—has publicly disclosed the terms of its market-maker agreements. The rest? Black boxes.
The study, reported by Cointelegraph’s Amin Haqshanas, reviewed protocols across decentralized exchanges, lending platforms, perpetual futures, layer-1 and layer-2 networks, bridges, and centralized exchange tokens. The fully diluted valuations ranged from roughly $40 million to $45 billion. The methodology used a binary transparency framework, cross-checking public sources including Artemis, Token Terminal, Dune, DefiLlama, and Blockworks Research.
The result: less than 1% disclosure. Not “limited” disclosure. Not “partial.” Near-zero. Meteora’s decision to publish details in its 2025 Annual Token Holder Report made it the lone data point in a dataset that covers some of the most actively traded assets in crypto.
Why Crypto Market-Maker Opacity Should Concern Every Trader
“This is the single most consequential transparency gap in the industry,” Novora founder Connor King wrote on X. He’s not being dramatic. In traditional finance, market-making arrangements are routine disclosures—regulated by the SEC, overseen by FINRA, and documented in filings any investor can pull. In crypto, the same kind of deal sits behind closed doors between a project and a market maker, invisible to the people buying the token.
The opacity isn’t because the data doesn’t exist. Novora found that 91% of the protocols it reviewed generated trackable revenue. But only 18% published quarterly updates, and a mere 8% issued token holder reports. The information is there. Projects just don’t share it.
Sector-level breakdowns paint an uneven picture. Perpetual futures protocols and decentralized exchanges tend to lead on disclosure and value accrual mechanisms. Layer-1 and infrastructure projects lag behind—despite commanding the largest market capitalizations in the dataset. Bigger valuations, less transparency. Make of that what you will.
The practical stakes are concrete. One widely criticized arrangement, the so-called “loan option model,” involves projects lending tokens to market makers who deploy them for liquidity provision and trading—often tied to listing agreements. Critics argue this creates incentives to sell borrowed tokens into the market, driving down prices for everyone except the market maker. The SEC has previously charged crypto market makers with wash trading and price manipulation, confirming these aren’t hypothetical concerns.
The Novora study arrives as crypto pushes deeper into regulated territory. Tokenized securities platforms are moving toward mainstream adoption, and institutional capital is pouring into digital assets through vehicles like stablecoins and ETFs. But the infrastructure underneath—how tokens actually get traded, who’s making markets, and on what terms—remains a disclosure desert.
Meteora disclosed. 149 protocols didn’t. The industry’s most important transparency question has a one-word answer: almost nobody.
