There’s a piece of information that every institutional investor in traditional markets takes for granted: the terms under which market makers operate for a given asset. Who are they, what are they paid, and how are they incentivized? In public equity markets, those disclosures are standard. In crypto, according to a new study, they are essentially nonexistent.
Crypto advisory firm Novora reviewed more than 150 major protocols and found that fewer than 1 percent disclose any terms related to their market-making arrangements.
Across the entire dataset, spanning decentralized exchanges, lending platforms, perpetual futures, layer-1 and layer-2 networks, bridges, and centralized exchange tokens, only one protocol had publicly disclosed details of its market-making setup: Solana-based decentralized liquidity platform Meteora, which did so through its 2025 Annual Token Holder Report.
One out of 150-plus. That’s not a gap. That’s a wall.
The transparency paradox: data Exists, reporting Doesn’t
What makes the finding particularly interesting is that the underlying data infrastructure is actually quite mature. Third-party analytics platforms have achieved significant coverage rates, Dune Analytics at 95 percent, Token Terminal at 93 percent, DefiLlama at 88 percent, and Artemis at 85 percent.
Some 72 percent of protocols are covered by four or more of these platforms. The information is out there, indexed and verifiable onchain. Protocols simply aren’t converting it into structured communication.
The transparency paradox, as Novora frames it: 91 percent of the protocols they reviewed generate trackable revenue, but only 18 percent published quarterly updates, and just 8 percent issued token holder reports. The data exists. What doesn’t exist, for the vast majority of projects, is the institutional-grade packaging that serious investors can actually consume.
Novora founder Connor King summed it up on X: “This is the single most consequential transparency gap in the industry.” He noted that market-maker agreements are standard disclosure items in traditional equity markets, and that in crypto, every market participant operates without this information.
That’s not a small problem. Market makers control liquidity, pricing, and spread dynamics. Understanding their incentive structure is fundamental to understanding a token’s actual trading behavior, yet that information is, by industry custom, treated as proprietary.
The study covered protocols ranging in size from roughly $40 million to $45 billion in fully diluted valuation, assessed using a binary transparency framework with checks against public sources including Artemis, Token Terminal, Dune, DefiLlama, and Blockworks Research. All 15 binary metrics were assessed without subjective scoring, either the information exists or it doesn’t.
Sector gaps and the Solana outlier
The report isn’t uniform in its criticism, some corners of the industry are doing meaningfully better than others, and the sector-level breakdown tells an interesting story.
Perpetual futures protocols lead on active value accrual, with 62 percent having some mechanism that returns economic value to token holders, compared to just 12 percent of layer-1 and layer-2 protocols. Decentralized exchanges and lending protocols tend to lead on disclosure and value accrual, while L1s and infrastructure projects lag despite often carrying the largest market capitalizations.
There’s a certain irony in that which is that the foundational layer of the industry, the ones carrying the most institutional capital and name recognition, are often the most opaque about their financial operations.
Layer-1 foundations, in particular, score lower on nearly every disclosure metric. Novora attributes this partly to the foundation governance model, which creates what it calls an “IR vacuum,” ; no single function owns investor communication, so it doesn’t get done.
Solana, by contrast, punches above its weight. Six of the 13 protocols that have filed under Blockworks’ Token Transparency Framework are Solana-based, including Jito, Jupiter, Meteora, and Raydium, suggesting the ecosystem has cultivated a culture of public accountability that Ethereum DeFi hasn’t yet matched.
The Token Transparency Framework itself was launched by Blockworks in June 2025 and presented to the SEC alongside Jito, with bipartisan support from investors at Pantera, Theia, and L1D. Blockworks positioned the framework as complementary to regulatory discussions rather than a substitute for regulation, a signal that industry-led transparency and eventual mandatory requirements can coexist.
As of the Novora report, only 9 percent of assessed protocols have filed, up from zero at launch, but still a crawl. Only 3 percent of the protocols reviewed have a dedicated investor relations hub, and just 5 percent maintain an investor-focused communication channel. The vast majority treat IR as a X (Twitter) account and a Discord, neither built for institutional capital.
The study also identified six distinct value accrual models operating across the ecosystem, from direct fee distribution to buyback-and-burn to governance-only tokens with no economic rights at all.
The performance gap between them is notable, with governance-only tokens averaging -51 percent returns over the assessed period versus -32 percent for tokens with active accrual mechanisms, a roughly 19 percentage point gap. The mechanism matters less than the fact that one exists at all.
For an industry that increasingly wants institutional capital at the table, this study may be an uncomfortable mirror. The data is accessible. The tools exist. What’s missing, for nearly all of these projects, is the will to actually use them, or perhaps more accurately, the competitive pressure that would make opacity costly.
That pressure may be coming. The SEC’s engagement with Blockworks’ framework last year suggests regulators are watching. Whether voluntary adoption accelerates ahead of potential mandates, or whether the industry waits to be pushed, is a question the next 12 months will likely start to answer.