A sweeping review of more than 150 major crypto protocols has found that market-making arrangements are almost never disclosed to token holders, exposing what researchers describe as the industry’s most consequential transparency failure. The supporting evidence appears in the cited X post.
The study, conducted by crypto advisory firm Novora, found that fewer than 1% of reviewed protocols publish any terms related to their market-maker relationships.
Across the entire dataset, only one protocol publicly disclosed details of its market-making arrangements: decentralized liquidity platform Meteora, which included the information in its 2025 Annual Token Holder Report.
Every other protocol in the review remained silent on arrangements that directly shape how their tokens trade in open markets.
A Transparency Gap With Real Consequences
Novora founder Connor King called out the severity of the finding in a post on X, writing that such material agreements are routinely disclosed in traditional financial markets. “This is the single most consequential transparency gap in the industry,” King wrote. “In crypto, every market participant operates without this information.”
The protocols in Novora’s dataset ranged in fully diluted valuation from roughly $40 million to $45 billion. The review covered leading crypto sectors including decentralized exchanges, lending platforms, perpetual futures, layer-1 and layer-2 networks, cross-chain bridges, and centralized exchange tokens.
That range makes the near-total absence of disclosure hard to dismiss as a niche or emerging-project problem.
Novora assessed protocols using a binary transparency framework, checking disclosure practices and third-party data coverage against public sources including Artemis, Token Terminal, Dune, DefiLlama, and Blockworks Research.
The methodology was designed to identify not just what protocols say about themselves, but what independently verifiable data exists about their operations.
The results revealed a structural contradiction. Third-party analytics infrastructure has matured significantly, with data coverage rates exceeding 85% across major platforms.
The underlying information is widely accessible. Yet protocols are not packaging it into formal investor communications, leaving token holders to piece together incomplete pictures on their own.
Investor Relations Infrastructure Is Missing Across the Sector
The market-maker disclosure problem sits inside a broader investor relations gap that Novora’s data makes difficult to ignore. The study found that 91% of the protocols reviewed generated trackable revenue, meaning the financial activity is real and documented.
But only 18% published quarterly updates, and just 8% issued token holder reports of any kind.
That means most protocols generate revenue that third-party platforms can observe, yet choose not to communicate it to the people holding their tokens.
The gap between data availability and structured disclosure is wide, and it is deliberate in the sense that it reflects choices protocols are making about how much to share.
Sector-level breakdowns show the problem is unevenly distributed. Perpetual futures protocols and decentralized exchanges tend to lead on disclosure and value accrual transparency.
Layer-1 networks and infrastructure projects trail behind, which is notable given that many carry the largest market capitalizations in the dataset. Investors in some of the most widely held tokens are getting the least structured information.
The opacity around market-maker arrangements carries specific risks beyond simple information asymmetry. One commonly used structure, known as the loan option model, involves projects lending tokens to market makers who then deploy those tokens across trading venues.
Critics of the arrangement argue it creates incentives for market makers to sell borrowed tokens into the market, effectively distributing sell pressure in ways that token holders cannot anticipate or track.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission has previously charged crypto market makers with price manipulation, and regulatory attention to these structures has not faded.
What Novora’s study adds to this conversation is scale. The criticism of opaque market-maker arrangements has been available for years, but it has largely been applied case by case.
Reviewing more than 150 protocols and finding a single instance of voluntary disclosure turns an anecdotal concern into a documented industry norm. The data confirms that the absence of disclosure is not an oversight at individual projects.
It is the default.
For token holders and institutional participants trying to assess how a protocol’s token actually trades, the practical implication is that a central piece of market structure information is simply unavailable. Third-party platforms can show trading volumes, liquidity depth, and revenue flows.
They cannot show the contractual terms under which a designated market maker is operating, what incentives that market maker has, or what happens when an arrangement ends. That information lives in private agreements, and based on Novora’s review, it almost never comes out.
Not Financial Advice: This article is for informational purposes only. Crypto investments are highly volatile. Always do your own research.
