Crypto Body Unveils Market-Making Best Practice

The Crypto Market Integrity Coalition (CMIC), a 51-strong industry body, has released a best practices framework for market making in crypto, to address the growing regulatory interest in the space as well as the increase in institutional participation in the sector.

The standard addresses “the current gap in clear, actionable best practices for integrity-driven digital asset market making”, the body states, and provides practical guidance on conflict of interest disclosure and management, market abuse prevention, and global compliance alignment. This highlights a collective effort by leading crypto firms and the broader industry to proactively tackle integrity challenges in this critical market function, CMIC says.

The Standard, which can be found here, calls for transparent disclosure and mitigation practices for conflicts involving shareholders, executives, and employees, critically where firms act as both principal and agent. It also encourages firms to adopt market surveillance systems, enforce internal controls, and address both traditional manipulation tactics (e.g. spoofing, wash trading) and crypto-native abuse (e.g. oracle manipulation, social media sentiment schemes). The best practice measure also promotes jurisdiction-specific protocols that align with global best practices while preparing firms to evolve with future regulation.

“Market making is the backbone of liquid, efficient markets – but crypto’s structure introduces novel risks, especially around conflicts of interest and manipulation,” says Chen Arad, co-founder of Solidus Labs, one of the founding members of CMIC. “This Standard demonstrates that the industry can act ahead of regulation – offering firms and policymakers a blueprint for what responsible, transparent digital asset market making looks like.”

The body says it is actively developing further standards to address market integrity challenges surrounding shared-surveillance, tokenisation, staking, fraud, and other issues.