Someone always thinks that market making is just lying down to earn money—throw the coins into the pool and wait to collect trading fees. I looked at on-chain data; these people probably haven’t even seen what an AMM curve looks like. To put it plainly, market making is you providing free liquidity to the whole market. When price fluctuations get a bit larger, impermanent loss will get you—directly, and your fees will be what gets eaten up. You think you’re working a job? No—you’re basically working for traders.

Especially for those new L1/L2 that hand out incentives and boost TVL: old users may say things like “mine, then sell, then claim,” but all those failed transactions on-chain, and nonces bouncing around, are exactly people who didn’t understand the curve’s curvature and still threw money in anyway.

Anyway, every time I see someone hype “market making is risk-free,” I just want to fire back: when ETH drops 20%, try going into the pool and taking a look—see if it’s red enough that even your mom wouldn’t recognize it. Of course, it’s not that you can’t play, but first make sure you understand which part of the curve you’re standing on, how delta-neutral is calculated, and then talk about returns. That’s it for now.