This Proposal has 6 Parts:
- Addressing the rationale behind Listing $MIN on a CEX
- Comparing the 2 main CEX considered and their costs
- Determining the best model for Market Making for $MIN and evaluating the offering of different Market Makers
- Funding source: DAO Treasury
- Addressing the need for MIN/ADA DAO liquidity removal for Market Making Liquidity
- Proposal choices, strategy opinion by Minswap Labs
TLDR: the Proposal advocates for the Listing of $MIN on MEXC, with CLS as Market Makers for a 1 year contract. CLS has recommended removal of 1mn USD of Liquidity, this would come from the POL and would serve as Market making liquidity and generate better trading conditions.
1. Why the Listing of $MIN on a CEX
The Minswap community has voiced the desire to have $MIN listed on a CEX for a long time. The aim is to enhance $MIN’s visibility, liquidity, and accessibility. This initiative should be backed by strong market making to ensure a healthy trading environment and sustained growth of $MIN on CEXs. Funding of the listing, marketing cost and Market Making fees are to come from the DAO treasury and the MIN/ADA POL liquidity used to market make on CEX is to come from Protocol Owned Liquidity.
1.1 Objectives of Listing $MIN on CEXs:
- Market Validation: Listing on reputable CEXs serves as a badge of credibility, given their rigorous due diligence process. It signals to the market that $MIN is a vetted and reliable asset.
- Enhanced Liquidity and Accessibility: Access to CEXs opens $MIN to a broader audience, including those less familiar with Onchain Dapps, thus expanding the Minswap holders and the community.
- Potential Revenue for DAO: Market makers take advantage of arbitrage gaps as they arise, they take advantage of price fluctuations and generate profits through surplus rebalancing in the order books. A part of these profits would come back to the DAO treasury.
2. CEX comparison and costs
We propose the Listing of $MIN on MEXC. We offer a comparison of MEXC with the other top candidate we evaluated, Gate.io. While the community has long pleaded for the Listing of $MIN on a Tier 1 CEX, the path towards that is not straightforward. First, what is required is to list in Tier 2 exchanges, to gain recognition and more organic volumes.
MEXC:
MEXC caters to more than 10 million users in more than 170 countries and regions around the world. MEXC aims to become the go-to platform for new traders and experienced investors as they move forward in their financial journey.
Gate.io:
Established in 2013, Gate.io has consistently ranked among the top 10 exchanges. It is a full-service digital asset exchange platform covering millions of users around the world.
CEX Fees and Requirements:
|
CEX |
MEXC |
|
|
KYC |
YES |
NO (Will soon have KYC) |
|
Volumes |
More Consistent Volumes |
More Organic volumes/Retail |
|
Cost of Listing |
100K USDT |
10K USDT |
|
Marketing Cost |
30K USDT + 30K USD Worth of $MIN |
50K USDT |
|
Total Cost including Marketing |
160K USDT |
60K USDT |
|
Minimum Liquidity Req |
No requirements |
30K USDT + 30K USD Worth of $MIN |
|
Rank (According to CMC) |
7 |
11 |
3. Determining the best model for Marketing Making for $MIN and evaluating the offering of different Market Makers
3.1 Determining the best model
There are two market making models: the proprietary model and Market Making as a Service (MMaaS). Besides their incentive structures, the key difference between the two models is the working capital requirements, the funds needed to start market making.
The proprietary market making model has lower working capital requirements: a crypto project only has to lend their tokens to the market maker. The market maker, in turn, takes care of providing the collateral for the market pairs. The project or community does not receive any interest on this token loan. Most of the time, the service contract allows market makers to sell the tokens at a predetermined price. This is where the conflict of interest might arise between the client and the service provider. This arrangement makes the proprietary model potentially highly inefficient financially.
Contrastingly, the MMaaS model requires paying a fixed, regular service fee, and the token project adding its own collateral. This can turn out to be a much better value in most of the cases. MMaaS does not only give projects full control over market making strategy. They get to keep the ownership of their tokens and the collateral — as well as all the profits and losses (P&L) of market making. The MMaaS provider gives operational and trading support to its clients. They choose, shape, and implement the right market-making strategy together, in constant consultation.
Given the inherent advantages of MMaaS, such as operational support, strategic flexibility, and financial efficiency,we recommend adopting the MMaaS model for $MIN CEX listings.
3.2 Market Makers: Proposals and Evaluation of providers
We propose the hiring of CLS Global as Market Makers. We offer a comparison of CLS with candidates we evaluated, such as Enflux.
Two market making firms, CLS Global and Enflux, have presented comprehensive strategies to support $MIN's liquidity and trading activity.
CLS Global: A leading player in the crypto market, CLS Global has 5 years on Crypto Markets with 300+ active clients and operates in more than 80 Centralized exchanges. They are the MM behind to name a few, Jasmycoin, Snek, Ergo. They know the requirements of all Tier 1 CEXes, and can proceed with the intro to facilitate a listing process. You can read more about the CLS strategy here (it includes Minswap DEX being the price leader, and adding arbitrage later on).
Enflux: Enflux is a market maker based in Singapore, a market-making as a service company, catering to small and mid-cap Web3 projects.
Other market makers were evaluated as well such as Kairon Labs or GSR. They were discarded for many reasons such as not working with the MMaaS model, no Arbitrage support, or high fees (7k USD a month).
Cost of MMs as service providers:
|
MM |
CLS Global |
ENFLUX |
|
Retainer Fee for 1 Exchange 12 Months |
$25,000 |
$23,400 |
4. Funding source: DAO Treasury
This is a DAO funded initiative as it aims to bring visibility, liquidity, and accessibility to the $MIN token. The DAO treasury has 934,623 ADA(468k USD as of April 24th) from which USD fees would be paid. The $MIN would come from the DAO treasury allocation which currently has 200mn $MIN.
The combined costs for Listing of $MIN on MEXC with CLS as Market Maker would be: 85,000 USD (18.16% of Treasury). Once the 12 month term is over, another Proposal will be posted.
5. Addressing the need for MIN/ADA DAO liquidity removal for Market Making Liquidity
During the last months, Deux Ex DAO, a group of tokenomics and strategy experts, have delved into Minswap's liquidity, emissions, and treasury from 2023. One of the main conclusions was that the DAO treasury is heavily overweight in MIN/ADA LP tokens, and that MIN/ADA lIquidity is highly incentivized but it's the least efficient Pool on Minswap. It could support the same Volumes, with much less Liquidity. You can read the full report here.
Given the inefficiencies observed in the MIN/ADA pool, leveraging POL for market making on CEXs presents an opportunity to optimize the Treasury Management. Market makers recommended removing a significant part of the POL for 2 main reasons:
- To use for liquidity requirements on the CEX's: the recommendation is to have enough liquidity for 2% depth. Based on the liquidity currently there is more than 350k USD needed to move the MIN price by 2%. It's possible a large amount of this liquidity remains unutilized, but this may vary depending on the aggressiveness of the trading activity.
- To create better trading conditions for the token: due to high liquidity, the $MIN token is not very volatile, which does not make for a great trading environment. CEX Listing and liquidity would help generate more organic trading volumes on the token, the increased volatility would attract more CEX users towards trading $MIN, and generate more volumes and Fees for Minswap.
As of April 24th, the POL has MIN/ADA Liquidity worth 6,650,009 $ADA and 114,708,339 $MIN worth about 6,669,268 USD. Market Makers have recommended substantial removal of Liquidity of 500k USD worth of $MIN and 500k USD worth of ADA, which would be about 15% of DAO owned MIN/ADA Liquidity.
The Liquidity would be removed shortly before the CEX Listing. Not all would be added to the CEX market making account immediately. In the near future, a working group would be set up that would have discretion over the timing, sizing and management of these funds. For now, this responsibility would remain with Minswap Labs, which will work closely with the Market Maker chosen towards the best strategy.
6. Proposal choices, strategy opinion by Minswap Labs
This would be a Yes/No Proposal for the Listing of $MIN on MEXC with CLS as Market Maker with a cost of 85,000 USD and a Liquidity removal of 1,000,000 USD worth of $MIN/$ADA LP.
Over the last months, Minswap Labs has done considerable research which is how we came towards the proposed strategy.
When it comes to the CEX choice, our understanding is that listing on MEXC would be the best cost/benefit option. MEXC has been increasing its organic users, and is the cheapest option for listing when it comes to Tier 2 exchanges. Gate.io has a good reputation, but we anticipate that 160k USD would not be worth the investment given its current user base. It is possible to achieve a Tier 1 CEX Listing after having listed on MEXC, and CLS could help facilitate a deal with good terms.
When it comes to Market Makers, our preference is towards CLS because they have done a fantastic job when market making for $SNEK and are familiar with Cardano. They're a bigger size Market maker with 5+ years experience, 350+ serviced clients, and connections with Top 20 CEX.
When it comes to Liquidity Removal, as we have learnt, currently MIN/ADA Liquidity is underutilized and capital inefficient. In a CEX, it will generate deep liquidity depth (a metric very important for institutions) and more volatility. Additionally, having significant liquidity available from the start wouldn't require removing more Liquidity once another Listing opportunity presents itself.
