Market Making and Beyond: Insights from Vortex Co-Founder

Vortex, a prominent market maker, has become a reliable solution for projects facing growth and liquidity challenges. Founders often struggle with issues like stagnant token performance, weak chart metrics, and the risk of delisting from exchanges. Vortex addresses these problems with effective market-making algorithms, liquidity provision, and tailored advisory services that support project success.

In this interview, Vortex’s Co-Founder Gleb Gora discusses with BeInCrypto how the company’s’s strategic approach is driving sustainable growth for crypto projects in today’s competitive market​

Can you share how Vortex started and how it evolved over time?

Vortex was first started as a vision of managing and growing wealth, providing an efficient trading infrastructure for professional and institutional traders in crypto. However, since 2021, we’ve seen a bigger opportunity in another niche, which was still pretty empty back then — market making. That’s when our vision consolidated into this journey and we’ve decided to fully move into the world of market making.

Vortex has adopted several unique market approaches, including various tech innovations and a broad range of strategic offerings for projects. However, what truly sets us apart is our client service. Over the years, we’ve refined our client communication to the highest level compared to our competitors. This focus on communication is a key metric where Vortex excels, contributing to our 93% client retention rate in 2023 and 85% year-to-date — outpacing the industry average by 25-30%.

Understanding your client needs is vital for any business, alongside efficient communication, which is absolutely crucial for profitable market making, especially when it comes to strategies based on project’s KPIs and unique needs. Alongside 24/7 support, that’s one of the key reasons why most of our clients make money while working with Vortex.

How does the world of market making look from the inside?

Since the beginning, we introduced Vortex’s proprietary trading software and dashboard, and we continuously improve them on a dynamic basis. Without spoiling all the juice, here are some of the key metrics and tools we rely on when managing markets.

• Order book integration from CEX with increased order history and added metrics which allow us to analyze the order book within seconds and make informed decisions based on that. Those metrics include order segregation, historical order book data, combined data across all exchanges and instant order execution based on that.
• Batch orders. A basic feature which allows you to instantly place multiple orders or execute them.
• Dynamic orders, a feature which allows to put efficient buy and sell walls.
• Advanced order execution, an automated tool which trades with the best bid and ask order to ensure dynamic trading environment.
• Proprietary trading algorithms designed for both T1 and T2 markets, tailored to meet the specific needs of each project. One of the most in-demand systems is our treasury-building algorithm.
• Additionally, we continuously refine a range of innovative tools, including metrics for stats, balance deltas, built-in PNL tracking, and more. We update and improve these features daily to ensure they deliver optimal market insights.

It’s very important to have a panel which meets all of the essential needs MMs face. An effective dashboard is a major part of success when it comes to executing most market making strategies, especially dynamic ones.

What are the main challenges market makers might face?

Market makers face various daily challenges, making it crucial to have dynamic tools for tracking accurate real-time data and automated algorithms that can trade without constant human intervention.

One of the most common issues is dealing with market takers who sell into the liquidity provided during volatile conditions. Market makers must offer liquidity 24/7, even in turbulent environments. During sell-offs or periods of high volatility, market takers can exploit this liquidity, leading to losses. While effective risk management and dynamic order strategies can mitigate this risk, it remains a key focus area for MMs.

In retainer-based market making, specific risks arise from inadequate client KPIs, especially in illiquid markets. A typical issue is excessive price support requested by projects without sufficient budgets or clear goals, leading to unnecessary spending. While not a direct risk, this challenge highlights the importance of projects listening to expert traders to avoid costly mistakes.

Does Vortex expand beyond market making?

Becoming a full-fledged token partner is one of the key visions behind creating Vortex. Apart from providing market making service, Vortex always goes beyond that and actively supports clients on:

Marketing. Vortex goes beyond standard market making by offering strategic marketing assistance. This includes introducing clients to top Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and leading marketing agencies. Vortex also offers guidance on developing and implementing marketing plans. This helps projects gain visibility and reach their target audience effectively.

Smart Contract Audits. Vortex ensures that projects are built on a secure foundation by offering comprehensive smart contract audits. These audits are conducted both in-house and through trusted partners, focusing on identifying potential vulnerabilities and ensuring the robustness of the contract’s code. This helps prevent security breaches and instills confidence in the project’s community and investors.

Strategic Web3 Advisory. Beyond market making, Vortex offers in-depth advisory services tailored to the unique challenges and opportunities within the Web3 space. This includes guiding clients through token launches, ecosystem development, and long-term strategic planning. The goal is to help projects achieve sustainable growth while navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of decentralized technologies.

Tokenomics Development and Audit. Vortex assists projects in designing and refining their tokenomics, ensuring that the economic model aligns with long-term project goals. This service includes auditing existing tokenomics structures to identify inefficiencies or areas for improvement. By offering data-driven insights, Vortex helps projects create token models that support liquidity, incentivize engagement, and foster ecosystem stability.

Providing all of the mentioned services proves highly valuable for many clients, as it ensures that market-making strategies align seamlessly with project plans and development timelines. This holistic approach enhances the effectiveness of market-making efforts by directly supporting the broader goals of each project.

Beyond these services, Vortex actively collaborates with over 20 launchpads and 15 venture capital firms, helping projects secure primary funding. We also plan to introduce our own launchpad by Q2 2025, further expanding the ecosystem.

What are the main trends driving the market right now, and where do you see things heading next?

Since I’ve started my journey in Web3, I’ve seen the space evolve so many times that it actually makes crypto completely different from what it was back in 2017. The NFT bags from 2021 are not going back to their ATH, most L0/1s turned out to be useless even as of today, rugs are more common than during the ICO boom and memes are now a major share of Web3.

I guess we can say that the space has evolved from building and innovating exciting tech to mostly pumping our own bags. We stopped caring about the fundamental part of most coins, predominantly focusing on hype, momentum and greed. Most innovative AI and blockchain projects are going down, while the Solana ecosystem grew. It’s obviously a temporary stage of the market, but it still sets us back from the initial vision behind Bitcoin in the first place. 

I do believe that the next stage of crypto will be characterized as a stage of mass institutional adoption of crypto, which will completely evolve the space. DeFi and CeFi will most likely be even less interlinked than today, with DeFi slowly losing its market share over the years due to increased regulations from most nations.

The ETFs will be the key cash inflow to the market, influencing major altcoins and helping other similar projects grow as a whole asset class.  Just like in every bull market before, most projects will lose a significant portion of their market cap, while others will capture their market share and many new solutions will appear, with a strong emphasis on RWA, AI and dApps.

What are the key factors that can make or break a project’s success?

Web3 is a very fascinating and somewhat complicated space with a unique blend of important traits a project has to have to become the next big thing. When it comes to success factors though, I would typically tend to divide short term success and long term vision as to different yet somewhat interconnected aspects.

Good momentum is achieved through a combination of effective community management, good brand that vibes with the overall space and/or strong support from respected industry experts. If those three are executed to a top-notch level, projects have enough momentum to generate sufficient buzz to shoot for the “next big thing” type of project. When it comes to long term success, we do have to account for more technical aspects — team execution, funding and economic model and, most importantly, the idea or vision itself.

Partnerships, backers and the overall vibe is crucial in helping the project get the initial traction — with enough experience, you can typically distinguish projects that have a shot from those that don’t in less than 1 minute just by checking those metrics.