Maker

In trading, a maker is a market participant who adds liquidity to the market by placing an order that is not immediately filled but instead sits on the order book waiting to be matched with a future counterpart. For example, if you place a limit buy order for Bitcoin at a price below the current market price, that order becomes part of the order book and provides liquidity for other traders who want to sell at that price. Because makers contribute to market depth and facilitate trading for others, exchanges typically reward them with lower trading fees — or in some cases, even rebates.

This is in contrast to a taker, who removes liquidity from the market by executing against an existing order in the order book. When you place a market order or a limit order that matches immediately with an existing offer, you are acting as a taker. Takers are generally charged higher fees than makers because they are consuming the liquidity that makers provide. The maker-taker fee model is used by most major cryptocurrency exchanges and is designed to incentivize participants to provide liquidity and maintain healthy market depth.

For algorithmic traders, understanding the maker-taker distinction has direct implications for profitability. Strategies that predominantly use limit orders and operate as makers benefit from lower fees, which can significantly improve net returns over a high volume of trades. Market-making bots, which continuously post buy and sell orders on both sides of the order book, are the most extreme example of maker-oriented strategies. Even non-market-making strategies can be optimized to reduce taker activity and maximize the proportion of trades executed as a maker, especially when trading on exchanges with significant fee differentials between the two roles.