Snek Taps Flowdesk as Liquidity Provider for Cardano’s First CEX-DEX Integration: What This Means for the Ecosystem

Snek has selected Flowdesk as its market maker across centralized and decentralized exchanges, creating the first-ever CEX-DEX integration on Cardano. The partnership aims to enhance liquidity and trading efficiency for SNEK and other Cardano-based assets, marking a significant milestone in the blockchain’s growth and adoption.

Flowdesk in a nutshell 

 

Flowdesk is an innovative market-making and over-the-counter (OTC) trading firm specializing in the crypto market. It provides liquidity and trading solutions for token issuers, exchanges, and institutional clients. Flowdesk covers trading on more than 140 centralized and decentralized exchanges for more than 400 assets. Known for its high regulatory standards, Flowdesk has built a worldwide reputation for transparency, reliability, and efficiency in handling digital assets across global markets. 

What is Market Making

Market making is a financial service to provide liquidity and efficient markets to digital assets. 

• Reduce the costs to traders by tightens bid-ask spreads around the spot price
• Adjust the orders distribution automatically
• Harmonize price across exchanges (CEX-DEX)

In simpler terms, market making makes it easier for traders to enter and exit positions by providing stable and transparent pricing. 

Why CEX-DEX integration matters

Liquidity is essential for efficient and reliable financial markets, enabling traders to buy or sell assets without causing major price swings—an especially valuable feature in volatile markets like crypto. In most cases, the bulk of liquidity for crypto assets is sourced from liquidity pools on decentralized exchanges (DEXs), which usually operate independently of centralized exchanges (CEXs). 

On CEXs, market makers require liquidity to place buy and sell orders that populate the order book. However, the token amounts within these orders are often constrained by the size of the market maker’s liquidity on the CEX, making them sensitive to price shifts. Without DEX integration, around 10% of the market maker’s CEX liquidity typically goes into the order book. 

When DEX integration is introduced, market makers gain the ability to rebalance and arbitrage in real time with the primary liquidity source. This enables them to maintain the order book as long as the price is supported by DEX liquidity, significantly enhancing trading efficiency. With this integration, traders on CEXs get a seamless experience comparable to trading on DEXs, providing greater flexibility for larger trades.

Instead of being fragmented across multiple exchanges, DEX liquidity can now be instantly utilized and leveraged by the CEX, dramatically increasing order book depth and attracting more traders.

What it means for Snek and the Cardano ecosystem

This marks a new era for Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem, creating a seamless trading experience that merges the benefits of centralized and decentralized, unlocking the core liquidity of most Cardano Native Assets. The integration serves as a strong signal of Cardano’s readiness to compete with other major chains. 

For Snek, this integration has multiple direct benefits:

• Increased liquidity on CEXs
• Increased trading volume from organic traders, live rebalancing and arbitrage activities
• Stronger positioning for Tier 1 listings 

Flowdesk has already begun market-making for SNEK on centralized exchanges, with DEX integration expected to go live in early December.