Bybit Market Maker Requirements: Listing Liquidity, MM Tiers and Derivatives Depth

On a venue where perpetual volume routinely exceeds spot turnover by a wide multiple, the perpetual book sets the reference price and the spot book follows. That has a direct consequence for issuers: a market maker quoting only the spot pair is quoting the derivative market's shadow. If the perp is thin, funding swings violently, liquidation cascades gap the price, and your spot quotes get run over by flow that originated somewhere your provider is not watching.

The practical requirement is therefore a provider that quotes or at minimum hedges across both books and understands the funding mechanism. Ask any candidate how it prices your pair on Bybit, what it uses as reference, and how it behaves when funding goes strongly one way. A desk that cannot answer that in specific terms is running a generic bot.

Bybit operates institutional and market maker programmes with tiered maker fees that reduce and, at higher tiers, become rebates on both spot and derivatives. Access requires an institutional account with corporate verification: incorporation documents, ownership to ultimate beneficial owners, director identification, source of funds and an AML framework, alongside evidence of trading capital, historical volume and technical infrastructure.

Obligations mirror the benefits. Firms are assessed on maker volume contribution, spread within a target band, depth at defined distances from mid, and two-sided uptime over the measurement window, with periodic tier reviews. For a desk operating on thin per-trade margins, the rebate tier often determines whether quoting a given pair is viable at all — which is why an issuer benefits from hiring a firm that already holds a strong tier on the venue.

Listing teams assess whether the token will trade properly from the first minute and keep trading after the launch attention fades. In practice that means a contracted market maker in place before trading opens, two-sided quotes on both the spot pair and, where applicable, the perpetual, tight spread relative to comparable assets, and depth that does not evaporate during the first volatility event.

They also assess organic participation. A pair where the market maker is the only meaningful participant is a fragile listing, and the exchange's own users bear the cost. Projects that already trade with genuine turnover elsewhere, and that can show a KPI schedule with their provider, present a far stronger case than projects arriving with a volume promise.

Write the venue into the annex. The agreement should name Bybit explicitly, distinguish spot from perpetual obligations, and set separate targets for each: time-weighted spread bands, depth at ±0.5%, ±1% and ±2% of mid, and two-sided uptime as a percentage, with a defined exclusion regime for exchange maintenance and API outages. Reporting should be raw per-venue data on a daily or weekly cadence, not a summary dashboard.

Add two clauses that matter on derivatives-heavy venues. First, a defined behaviour standard during extreme volatility — spreads may widen and size may reduce within bands, but quoting continues. Second, an explicit prohibition on any trading pattern designed to influence funding or produce the appearance of volume, with immediate termination rights. Both are easy to agree pre-signature and impossible to add later.

The workable timeline is similar to any major venue. Define the liquidity plan and inventory budget around ten weeks out. Run a competitive process across several desks, weighting those with an existing Bybit tier and demonstrable derivatives capability. Negotiate the KPI annex six weeks out, complete onboarding and inventory transfer four weeks out, and measure independently from the first hour of trading.

Xavion runs this on the issuer's side, including the venue relationship work through our institutional access programme, where entity onboarding and desk introductions frequently move faster than a cold application. We take no fees from providers, which is what lets us tell a client that a term sheet should be declined.