AthenaX Live with Matthieu Jobbé-Duval (CoinWatch)
“If someone promises price management, that’s not market making—that’s manipulation.”
Matthieu Jobbé-Duval is the founder of CoinWatch, a marketplace and monitoring platform that helps crypto projects source, evaluate, and track market makers in real time. Before crypto, Matthieu spent nine years at Barclays as a derivatives trader, later moving into Web3 through roles at CoinList, Coinbase, and Dapper Labs.
In this AthenaX Live episode, Matthieu Jobbé-Duval breaks down how crypto market making actually works, why “active market making” is often just price manipulation, and how CoinWatch is pushing the industry toward transparency—whether market makers like it or not.
CoinWatch is a “marketplace for projects to find the market maker—think Kayak, but for market-making deals.”
CoinWatch operates two core products:
This removes blind trust and replaces it with verifiable execution.
Matthieu: After nine to ten years trading crude oil derivatives, I was 30, managing a team, and honestly, bored. I couldn’t hear about pipelines, refineries, and VLCCs anymore. The job was safe—too safe. These golden handcuffs felt too tight.
I discovered Bitcoin in 2018. As a trader, everything is risk-reward. I could either buy Bitcoin and stay put—or quit my job and work in crypto. I chose the second option. My salary was divided by seven or eight, and I had no idea what a product manager even did. But once I experienced product-market fit, there was no going back.
At CoinList, Matthieu helped build
At Coinbase, he led institutional yield products—until SEC pressure made the role mostly about lawyers.
At Dapper Labs, he worked on NFT liquidity post-NBA Top Shot—until the market deteriorated.
That’s when CoinWatch was born.
Matthieu: The FBI exposed a very specific and murky corner of crypto market making—what people call “active market making.” This term doesn’t exist in TradFi. It’s just a wrapper for price manipulation.
The pitch for these unethical market makers sounds great: “We’ll protect your price. We’ll manage your chart.”
In reality, it’s about exploiting low circulating supply, pushing prices artificially, and dumping later. In traditional markets, this would be immediately illegal.
CoinWatch filters these firms out. They are not welcome on our marketplace or on CoinWatch Track.
Matthieu: Zero impact. We already exclude these actors. Out of 44 market makers on CoinWatch RFP and 22 on CoinWatch Track, we only work with firms that accept real KPIs and real monitoring.
Some firms were even removed from the platform for misbehavior—taking loans, dumping tokens, then disappearing.
That’s not market making. That’s extraction.
Matthieu: Market-making deals are scary—for founders. You’re lending basis points to percentages of total token supply to a hedge fund. If they act irresponsibly, they can destroy your token.
Until recently, founders had two bad options:
CoinWatch Track changes this, it connects directly to API keys, streaming trading volume, bid-offer spreads, order-book depth, exchange-by-exchange activity in real time.
Projects of all sizes now demand this—except one group. The only projects that don’t want transparency are the ones doing active market making.
Matthieu: Liquidity is non-negotiable. Without market makers, 80–90% of some order books disappear. Bad liquidity means high slippage, no serious investors and eventual delisting
But beyond liquidity, market-making deals are flexible tools at managing capex, structured token sales and providing short-term vs long-term options.
Take a look at DEX-only launches. They feel pure. They feel fast. They feel “crypto-native.” But what usually happens; Volume starts low, Visibility drops Price drifts down, CEXs refuse to list because volume is already weak
Then teams try to relaunch a new token just to feel “new” again.
We’re not in a world yet where DEX-only is a viable long-term strategy for 99% of projects.”
Matthieu: Coinwatch started from an advisory business and now has about 45 clients supported by five full-time engineers working on a trusted execution environment, developing APIs for tracking, autopilot liquidity routing.
We cycle through 22 market makers very actively, literally, we could do it daily if we wanted to, and this really allows us to be a smart liquidity router. So that for me is the natural next evolution of our business, where we really manage the assets of these foundations to provide them liquidity with no headache, no dozens of contracts to review, relationships to manage, and settlement of assets. We take care of everything. And then, of course, the next natural evolution after that is prime brokerage.
So these are just some of the things that we look at, but certainly, there is a lot of room to grow, and that's why I love building in crypto. There are just so many opportunities out there because it's still the beginning, and it's a pleasure and an honor to be able to have a product out there that clients of this caliber are using and enjoying.