Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Crypto Market Makers Made Markets

Crypto wash trading

In financial markets, there are people called “market makers.” A market maker, as the name implies, makes things called markets. But the market that a market maker makes is not, like, “the stock market.” “Market,” here, has a somewhat technical meaning. “Making a market,” in this context, means typing into a Bloomberg message, or saying over the telephone, two numbers: the price at which the market maker is willing to buy some security, and the (somewhat higher) price at which she is willing to sell it. So a customer will say “make me a market in XYZ bonds” ...