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Liquidity on trading pairs listed on 1st is provided through a combination of professional market makers and mirror tokens issued against imported private-market allocations. Each listed pair is designed to operate with continuous, two-sided liquidity from launch, rather than relying on sporadic order flow or passive listings. Before a trading pair goes live, 1st onboards a professional market maker specifically for that market. The market maker provides buy-side liquidity using USDC and sell-side liquidity using mirror tokens that are backed by a SAFT or SAFE lent to the market maker for that purpose.

Quoting behavior, minimum depth requirements, and uptime expectations are defined through market making agreements, ensuring consistent and predictable liquidity rather than best-effort participation. Market makers receive automatic fee rebates and do not accrue net trading costs when providing liquidity, allowing them to continuously support the order book without friction. Additional sell-side liquidity comes from mirror tokens issued against imported private-market allocations. Early investors and VC funds can list any portion of their remaining vesting allocations at any time, adding real supply that reflects genuine selling intent.

As more allocations are imported over time, sell-side liquidity increases organically, and listed pairs deepen as more private-market supply becomes tradeable. A trading pair on 1st only goes live once two conditions are met:
  • Market maker liquidity for the pair has been fully provisioned
  • At least one verified allocation has been imported for that pair
This ensures that every listed market launches with both buy-side and sell-side depth, rather than thin or one-sided order books. Over time, liquidity on each trading pair evolves through active market making, continued allocation imports, and the redeployment of liquidity-related fee reserves back into the same market. This structure allows liquidity to scale alongside trading activity while maintaining stable execution quality as markets mature.