market making used to be a balance sheet problem. you needed inventory, capital, and a quoting strategy. you needed servers close to the matching engine and a quant team that could measure adverse selection. then crypto happened, and over the last few years a much weirder version of market making started to dominate. the people who actually decide which products and assets get liquid in 2025 are not running latency-optimized engines on co-located servers. they are running meme pages on telegram, twitter, and instagram. distribution has become the new market making, and the products that figure this out first are going to win the next cycle.
this is the argument for why the meme page is functionally a market maker, what that implies for product design, and how uponly is structured around this reality. for the related pricing of attention, see the meme page economy.
what market making actually is
market making, stripped to its essentials, is the function of bridging a gap between buyers and sellers. a market maker absorbs the inventory imbalance that exists at any given moment, getting paid a spread for the service. on a traditional venue, the inventory is dollars and tokens. on a consumer product, the inventory is attention and intent.
when a meme page posts about a perp dex, the page is absorbing one side of an imbalance — the existing customers of that perp dex are not enough, and the platform needs new ones. the meme page sources new attention from its audience and routes it into the product. the platform pays for the service, usually with a rev share. it walks like market making, it quacks like market making, and the economics rhyme.
how meme pages function as liquidity sources
three structural similarities tie meme pages to traditional market makers:
- they reduce friction. a traditional market maker reduces friction between buyers and sellers by quoting on both sides. a meme page reduces friction between a product and its potential users by translating the product into language the audience already understands.
- they get paid on flow. market makers earn the spread. meme pages earn the rev share. both are compensated as a small percentage of the underlying economic activity they enable.
- they take inventory risk. a market maker is exposed to the price moving against their inventory. a meme page is exposed to the brand they promote underperforming or harming the audience. the operator who shills bad products burns down their inventory of trust.
the third point is the most important and the most underappreciated. meme page operators carry real reputational risk every time they post. that risk is what makes the channel valuable. if there were no consequence for shilling badly, the audience would not trust the recommendations.
why this model beats traditional acquisition
crypto has spent a decade trying to acquire users through paid ads, kol rounds, and conference sponsorships. all three are equivalent to renting a market maker who quotes wide and never makes a market. the dollars go in, the activity does not come out. or it comes out for a week and then disappears.
meme pages are different because the operator has skin in the game on every post. their audience punishes bad calls. their rev share rewards good ones. the alignment compounds in a way that paid acquisition never did. the audience knows the operator is exposed to the same trade, and that single fact changes the conversion rate by an order of magnitude.
the metrics that actually matter
if meme pages are market makers, the metrics that matter are not impressions or follower counts. the relevant metrics are flow quality and conversion durability. specifically:
- cohort ltv from a given page. how much real revenue does the audience produce over six months, not week one.
- retention curve shape. does the audience stick around or churn after the first trade.
- attribution durability. does the affiliate link still convert weeks after the original post.
- post-by-post variance. is the page consistent across posts or do they have one viral hit and a long tail of nothing.
- audience overlap with other high-converting pages. low overlap means independent audience, which compounds the value.
getting these metrics right requires actual tooling. spreadsheets do not work. findclout.com is the kind of attribution platform that meme page operators are starting to standardize on, because it tracks the post-to-revenue link the same way a market maker tracks pnl per strategy.
what this implies for product design
if your distribution is mostly meme pages, your product has to be designed for the meme page audience. that is a different design constraint than designing for paid-ad-acquired users. the differences are real:
- onboarding must be fast. meme page traffic does not tolerate a five-screen signup flow.
- core action must be one tap. the audience came from a scroll. the product has to match that cadence.
- share moments must be built into the product. the audience will post about your product if you give them content to post.
- fee model must respect the audience. fees that nibble at losing trades will get screenshotted in a meme page reply and you will lose the cohort.
- support must be human. meme page audiences ask questions in dms first, support tickets second.
uponly is built for this design constraint top to bottom. the rip is one tap. the share card is built in. the fee model has zero fees on losing trades. the affiliate rev share is 50 percent forever. the entire product is shaped around being the receiving end of meme page traffic.
where this is going next
the next chapter is consolidation of the meme page market maker layer. the operators who treat their pages like real businesses are going to professionalize. they will run multiple channels, measure cohort ltv per channel, and rotate inventory toward products with the best risk-adjusted returns. some of them are going to start branded ventures of their own — meme page operators turning into product owners. this is already happening in nft drops. it will happen in perps next.
the products that build the deepest partnerships with these operators will see the most durable growth. uponly is built for this — the 50 percent rev share, forever, no tier games, is the structural commitment that lets operators treat us as a primary venue. if you operate a meme page or run a creator channel and you want to test the market-maker analogy with real numbers, open uponly, look at the affiliate flow, and see how the cohort math works for your audience.
why this changes who wins the next cycle
the last cycle was won by products with strong technology and large balance sheets. the next cycle will be won by products with strong technology and deep creator partnerships. the balance sheet matters less because the marketing budget has been replaced with a rev share. the distribution layer has moved from paid ads to creators. the products that figured this out first are already lapping the field. the products that have not are still writing kol round checks and wondering why the metrics keep getting worse.
for the cultural background on why this layer exists and how it formed, see why arcade finance is the natural evolution. for the specifics of how to operate inside it, see how creator economies eat traditional marketing. then open uponly and rip a position. the loop will explain itself.