OKX Market Maker Requirements: Programme Access, Listing Liquidity and Depth Obligations

OKX offers tiered market maker terms across spot and derivatives. Higher tiers carry lower maker fees and, at the top, rebates, in exchange for measurable obligations: maker volume contribution, spread maintained within a target band, depth posted at defined distances from mid, and two-sided quoting uptime measured across the review window. Tiers are reviewed periodically and can move in both directions.

Access is institutional. The exchange requires corporate verification — incorporation documents, an ownership chart to ultimate beneficial owners, director identification, source of funds, and the firm's AML framework — alongside a technical profile covering API infrastructure, colocation, and the pairs the firm intends to quote. Firms with an existing track record on other major venues onboard considerably faster, which is a real advantage a provider brings to an issuer relationship.

You are unlikely to be a direct participant in the programme, and you should not want to be — an issuer quoting its own token is a governance problem. What you should do is borrow the language. The metrics OKX uses to grade its market makers are precisely the metrics your agreement with a provider should contain: time-weighted spread, depth at ±0.5%, ±1% and ±2%, two-sided uptime as a percentage of the window, and maker volume share.

It also means you should ask candidates directly what tier they hold on OKX and how long they have held it. A firm quoting from a favourable rebate tier can post tighter spreads on your pair profitably; a firm paying standard maker fees must either widen the spread or lose money, and one of those two will happen whatever the term sheet says.

OKX listing teams look for a pair that will trade properly from open and continue trading after the initial attention decays. In practice: a contracted market maker in place before trading begins, two-sided quotes from the first minute, spread tight relative to comparable assets, depth present at the standard bands, and continuity through the first volatility event rather than quote withdrawal.

They also weigh existing organic turnover elsewhere and the quality of the project's disclosure — float, unlock schedule, treasury governance and token classification. Liquidity is assessed as part of that picture, not in isolation. A well-documented unlock schedule with a market maker whose inventory is sized against it reads very differently from a large loan to a desk with no visibility into forthcoming supply.

Name the venue and set per-venue targets rather than portfolio averages, because a provider quoting five venues can hit an average while your OKX book sits empty. Specify the measurement methodology — sampling frequency, how depth is computed, how uptime handles partial outages — and require raw data, exported per venue, at a defined cadence. Define exclusions narrowly: exchange maintenance and documented API incidents, not general market volatility.

Include a behaviour standard for stress conditions and an explicit wash-trading prohibition with immediate termination and inventory return rights. Set the inventory return window at thirty to sixty days, not longer. These provisions cost nothing at signature and are the only leverage you will have in month six.

Two places. First, provider selection: running a competitive process across desks with real OKX tiers produces materially better terms than accepting the first term sheet, and it surfaces which firms are willing to be measured. Second, the ongoing relationship: most agreements do not fail at signature, they decay in month three when reporting slips and nobody is checking. Independent measurement of the venue data, held against the annex, is what keeps the desk engaged.

Xavion works only for the issuer. We take no referral fees from market makers, run the process across multiple desks, and stay in the relationship through the reporting phase. Our institutional access work also covers corporate onboarding and desk introductions on the major venues, including OKX, where a warm route through the institutional team is usually faster than a cold form.