Before you sign a market maker: 10 questions that separate the legit ones from the coin-grabbers.

Most new token teams treat "hiring a market maker" like hiring a plumber — find someone, pay them, done. Then they're shocked when the "market maker" dumps their treasury, vanishes, or bills them for "exchange fees" that never existed.

I've been close to a dozen launches. The teams that survived all asked the same hard questions before signing. The teams that got rekt skipped them. So here's the checklist I now hand to every founder I talk to.

1. How do you prove you're not a rug? Ask for verifiable on-chain addresses and past work — not a polished PDF. If they can't show live data, walk away.

2. If I give you coins to market-make, who controls the wallet? The safest setup is one where you hold the keys and the MM trades via a restricted API (no withdrawal rights). Anything else = custody risk.

3. What's your fee model — monthly, profit-share, or coin deposit? Monthly fee (they never touch your coins) is the lowest-risk. Coin-deposit deals sound cheap but align the MM against you.

4. Are there hidden fees? Push for a flat, written scope. "Exchange listing fees," "liquidity boosts," and "API costs" are the classic upsell traps.

5. What exchanges do you actually cover — CEX and DEX? Liquidity on three random DEXs means nothing if your buyers are on Binance or OKX. Match coverage to where your users are.

6. Market making is NOT price pumping — do you understand the difference? A real MM tightens spreads and absorbs volatility. If their pitch is "we'll send it to the moon," that's a pumper, not a maker.

7. Can I see a live dashboard of what you're doing? No transparency, no trust. You should see fills, spread, and inventory in real time.

8. Can we do this without handing over coins at all? More teams are running self-serve bots with restricted API access. You keep custody, you keep control, you pay a fraction. (Full disclosure: this is exactly why we ended up building our own tool — we couldn't find one we trusted that covered the exchanges we needed.)

9. What happens to my coins if we terminate? Get the return clause and timeline in writing. "We'll sort it out later" = red flag.

10. What's your downtime / risk plan? Bots fail. APIs get revoked. If they don't have a kill-switch and monitoring story, your liquidity vanishes at the worst moment.

The pattern: the teams that stay in control of their own coins almost never get burned. Custody is the whole game.

What questions did your team wish you'd asked? Drop them below — I'll add the good ones to the list. 👇