We quote real two-sided limit orders for your pair on SaturnSwap's Cardano L1 order book. Your liquidity never moves to us. It rests at your own instance of an audited validator, and that validator — not an agreement with us — decides where a single lovelace of it is allowed to go.
You keep your tokens. You set price floors below which we cannot quote. You hold a key that cancels everything and pulls your funds back, at any moment, without asking us. We run the maker and the taker side of your book and charge a fee in basis points of what actually settles, drawn from a prepaid channel you fund and can reclaim.
The standard arrangement is a loan: you send a market maker a slice of your supply as trading inventory, usually with a call option attached. The alternative is funding an account on a venue and letting a desk trade it. Both begin with your treasury leaving your control, and both are why market-maker deals have a public reputation as a way for token projects to get hurt.
We are not claiming the desks are crooked. We are pointing at the structure: once the tokens have moved, everything protecting you is a contract and a relationship. The recourse is legal, slow, and after the fact.
Desk pricing is contractually private, so the only reliable figures are the ones token DAOs have had to publish to pass a governance vote. Those show market-making retainers running from $3,500 to $12,500 a month for a single project, and industry reporting puts mandates that maintain active quotes at $15,000 to $50,000 a month. The retainer is not the whole bill either: the issuer also funds the inventory the desk quotes with, commonly tens of thousands of dollars per venue.
| What you give up | Retainer model | Loan + call model | SaturnSwap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cash up front | $3.5k–$50k / month | None | None |
| Your tokens | You fund the inventory | 1–5% of circulating supply, 12–24 months | None |
| Your upside | None | A call struck 25–100% above TGE | None |
| Ongoing | Fixed, whatever volume you get | The option is the fee | 0.20% of what actually settles |
| Custody | You fund a venue account | Tokens leave your treasury | Never leaves your validator |
The structural difference is that a retainer is fixed and ours is not. At 0.20% of settled volume, a $12,500-a-month retainer is only the cheaper deal once you are settling around $75 million a year. Below that — which is most of Cardano — you are paying a six-figure annual fee for liquidity you may not be getting. We charge a fraction of what settles, so if we quote badly and nothing fills, we do not get paid.
The loan model has no cash fee at all, which is what makes it attractive, and the cost shows up somewhere harder to see: you hand over a slice of supply for a year or two and sell the desk an option on your own recovery. If the token runs, they exercise. If it falls, they hand the tokens back. We never take your tokens, so there is no option to sell.
Retainer figures are from published DAO governance proposals and industry reporting; desks do not publish rate cards, and we are not quoting any specific firm's price to you. Loan terms are the ranges disclosed in DAO votes. Our 0.20% is OperatorFeeBps = 20, charged on settled volume and drawn from a prepaid channel you fund and can reclaim. The break-even is arithmetic: $150,000 a year ÷ 0.002.
Your liquidity sits at a script address parameterised with your key. We hold one bot key. What that key can do is decided by the on-chain validator, and there are exactly three places value is allowed to land:
Anything else fails the per-asset conservation check and the transaction does not settle. A bot-signed attempt to skim one lovelace is rejected, and there is a test in the public repo that does exactly that. Your exit is unilateral: your key alone cancels every order and reclaims your funds, with no signature, cooperation, or notice from us.
The validator source, the parameters, and the independent verifier are public. The trust model and onboarding page walks through what we can do, what we cannot, and what you still have to take on faith.
Every Cardano transaction pays a fixed floor of roughly 0.29 ₳ however little it settles. Our keeper packs many fills into one transaction, so that floor is paid once instead of once per fill. Past the floor an extra fill costs about 0.063 ₳.
| Fills sharing one transaction | Gas per fill | Gas as % of volume | All-in, our 0.20% included |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 fill, quoting alone | 0.4088 ₳ | 0.213% | 0.413% |
| 4 fills, a thin book | 0.1785 ₳ | 0.093% | 0.293% |
| 16 fills, a pooled book | 0.0861 ₳ | 0.045% | 0.245% |
A maker quoting alone pays 0.413% all-in. The same maker inside a pooled book pays 0.245%, our fee included — the gas alone is 4.75× lower for identical volume.
The cost per fill does not care which token you bring. Across three tokens with very different volumes it agreed to within half a percent: 0.0862, 0.0863 and 0.0867 ₳. So your fills ride transactions the book was already paying for, and each client who joins makes the batches deeper for everyone already in them — up to about sixteen fills, past which script execution costs outgrow the saving and the keeper stops packing.
Measured on our own book on preprod: 17,823 settled fills across 1,405 transactions quoting five tokens, 3,419,141 ₳ of volume for 1,696 ₳ of network fees. Crossing two clients into one transaction was measured at exactly zero premium — a sixteen-fill transaction cost 2.5695 ₳ whether the fills belonged to one client or two, byte-for-byte identical at 9,834 bytes. Every transaction behind these figures is linked, hash by hash, in the evidence brief.
Tell us your token and where it trades today. We will come back with what we would quote, what depth it needs, and what it would cost — before you commit to anything or move a single token.
Prefer to read first? The evidence brief has the full measured economics, and the trust model page has the custody detail and the onboarding ceremony.