Market Making, Transparency, and Why “Price Management” Is a Red Flag

AthenaX Live with Matthieu Jobbé-Duval (CoinWatch)-

“If someone promises price management, that’s not market making—that’s manipulation.”

Guest Bio

Matthieu Jobbé-Duval is the founder of CoinWatch, a marketplace and monitoring platform that helps crypto projects source, evaluate, and track market makers in real time. Before crypto, Matthieu spent nine years at Barclays as a derivatives trader, later moving into Web3 through roles at CoinList, Coinbase, and Dapper Labs.

Key Takeaways

“Active market making” is often price manipulation
Transparency protects founders and retailers alike
DEX-only launches are usually a long-term mistake
Market-making deals should be sized to real liquidity needs
Real-time verification should be the industry standard

Introduction

In this AthenaX Live episode, Matthieu Jobbé-Duval breaks down how crypto market making actually works, why “active market making” is often just price manipulation, and how CoinWatch is pushing the industry toward transparency—whether market makers like it or not.

CoinWatch is a “marketplace for projects to find the market maker—think Kayak, but for market-making deals.”.

CoinWatch operates two core products:

CoinWatch RFP – A marketplace where projects define their liquidity needs and receive competitive quotes from market makers
CoinWatch Track – A real-time monitoring tool that connects directly to market makers’ API keys to verify what they’re actually doing

This removes blind trust and replaces it with verifiable execution.

Leaving a Seven-Figure Trading Career

Q1 Why leave Barclays for crypto?

Matthieu: After nine to ten years trading crude oil derivatives, I was 30, managing a team, and honestly, bored. I couldn’t hear about pipelines, refineries, and VLCCs anymore. The job was safe—too safe. These golden handcuffs felt too tight.

I discovered Bitcoin in 2018. As a trader, everything is risk-reward. I could either buy Bitcoin and stay put—or quit my job and work in crypto. I chose the second option. My salary was divided by seven or eight, and I had no idea what a product manager even did. But once I experienced product-market fit, there was no going back.

From CoinList to Coinbase to Dapper Labs

At CoinList, Matthieu helped build

A wrapped Bitcoin interface that generated $5M ARR
A lending business before DeFi summer

At Coinbase, he led institutional yield products—until SEC pressure made the role mostly about lawyers.

At Dapper Labs, he worked on NFT liquidity post-NBA Top Shot—until the market deteriorated.

That’s when CoinWatch was born.

The FBI “Fake Token” Sting & Active Market Making

Q2 — What really happened with the FBI market-maker crackdown aka, NextFund AI?

Matthieu: The FBI exposed a very specific and murky corner of crypto market making—what people call “active market making.” This term doesn’t exist in TradFi. It’s just a wrapper for price manipulation.

The pitch for these unethical market makers sounds great: “We’ll protect your price. We’ll manage your chart.”

In reality, it’s about exploiting low circulating supply, pushing prices artificially, and dumping later. In traditional markets, this would be immediately illegal.

CoinWatch filters these firms out. They are not welcome on our marketplace or on CoinWatch Track.

Did the FBI investigation hurt CoinWatch?

Matthieu: Zero impact.

We already exclude these actors. Out of 44 market makers on CoinWatch RFP and 22 on CoinWatch Track, we only work with firms that accept real KPIs and real monitoring.

Some firms were even removed from the platform for misbehavior—taking loans, dumping tokens, then disappearing.

That’s not market making. That’s extraction.

Q3 — Why Transparency Terrifies Bad Market Makers

Matthieu: Market-making deals are scary—for founders. You’re lending basis points to percentages of total token supply to a hedge fund. If they act irresponsibly, they can destroy your token.

Until recently, founders had two bad options:

Trust self-reported spreadsheets
Use tools that still rely on market-maker-provided data

CoinWatch Track changes this, it connects directly to API keys, streaming trading volume, bid-offer spreads, order-book depth, exchange-by-exchange activity in real time.

Projects of all sizes now demand this—except one group. The only projects that don’t want transparency are the ones doing active market making.

What Serious Projects Look For in Market Making

Q\&A 4 — What do good projects actually care about?

Matthieu: Liquidity is non-negotiable. Without market makers, 80–90% of some order books disappear. Bad liquidity means high slippage, no serious investors and eventual delisting

But beyond liquidity, market-making deals are flexible tools at managing capex, structured token sales and providing short-term vs long-term options.

Take a look at DEX-only launches. They feel pure. They feel fast. They feel “crypto-native.” But what usually happens; Volume starts low, Visibility drops Price drifts down, CEXs refuse to list because volume is already weak

Then teams try to relaunch a new token just to feel “new” again.

We’re not in a world yet where DEX-only is a viable long-term strategy for 99% of projects.”

Q5 — What does success look like for Coinwatch?

Matthieu: Coinwatch started from an advisory business to now having about 45 clients supported by five full-time engineers working on a trusted execution environment, developing APIs for tracking, autopilot liquidity routing.

We cycle through 22 market makers very actively, literally, we could do it on a daily basis if we wanted to, and this really allows us to be a smart liquidity router. So that for me is the natural next evolution of our business, where we really manage the assets of these foundations to provide them liquidity with no headache, no dozens of contracts to review and relationships to manage and settlement of assets. We take care of everything. And then of course, the next natural evolution after that is prime brokerage.

So these are just some of the things that we look at, but certainly there is a lot of room to grow and that's why I love building in crypto. There are just so many opportunities out there because it's still the beginning, and it's a pleasure and an honor to be able to have a product out there that clients of this caliber are using and enjoying.