ForgeD Adds Crypto Market-Maker Leaderboard to DeFiLlama

DefiLlama has added Forgd’s market-maker leaderboard to its analytics platform, aiming to give traders, token teams, and liquidity researchers a more standardized view of how market makers perform across exchanges and individual tokens.

According to Forgd, the leaderboard aggregates data on spreads, market depth, trading volume, and uptime. The integration provides DefiLlama users with a dashboard that ranks market makers using consistent measurements for pricing quality, liquidity depth, reliability, and execution—rather than relying on fragmented, exchange-by-exchange metrics.

Key takeaways

• DefiLlama integrates Forgd’s leaderboard to surface market-maker performance indicators such as spreads, depth, volume, and uptime.
• Forgd claims broad coverage, with data spanning more than 500 token projects and 35 market-making firms using its tooling.
• Comparisons aim to be standardized, enabling users to benchmark liquidity providers across venues and token markets.
• Scores are not a pure “trading performance” grade, Forgd says: lower ratings may reflect incomplete “performance verification” opt-in rather than poor execution.

What DefiLlama’s new leaderboard adds

DefiLlama is widely used by the crypto community to track on-chain and protocol-level activity, liquidity, and cross-market performance. With the new integration, the platform extends beyond token analytics into a layer focused on the mechanics of market making—how liquidity is provided in practice.

Forgd told Cointelegraph that its dashboard ranks crypto market makers using standardized criteria, including pricing-related metrics (such as spreads), the capacity of markets to absorb trades (market depth), and reliability measures (uptime). By tying those inputs to an index, users can compare market makers in a way that is meant to be consistent across active engagements.

How the underlying data is sourced

Forgd says the leaderboard is built from data spanning more than 500 token projects and involves 35 market-making firms that use Forgd’s tools to monitor liquidity across their active engagements.

The company also positioned the leaderboard as a tool for token projects when it first launched in May—helping teams select, evaluate, and monitor liquidity providers. With the DefiLlama integration, the same dataset is now intended to be more broadly accessible to anyone using DefiLlama’s interface for market research.

Why liquidity teams and traders may care

In practice, liquidity quality is not just about how much trading volume exists—it’s also about how efficiently orders can be filled without excessive price impact and whether liquidity remains available under stress.

Ryan Celaj, DefiLlama’s head of research, said the integration adds another evaluation signal for market structure that complements commonly tracked metrics like volume and liquidity. In other words, two tokens with similar headline liquidity can differ meaningfully in how consistently market makers support them and how tight spreads remain as activity fluctuates.

For token teams, the promise is straightforward: an easier way to compare market makers on criteria that map more directly to trading experience. For traders and analysts, it offers a way to evaluate market resilience—especially when liquidity conditions change across venues or during periods of volatility.

Important caveat: scores may reflect verification coverage

While the leaderboard provides grades meant to summarize multiple dimensions of performance, Forgd cautioned that these ratings are not solely a reflection of how a firm trades.

“A lower grade on the index is not necessarily a judgment of a firm’s trading,” Forgd CEO Shane Molidor told Cointelegraph. He explained that the index can also reflect whether market makers have “fully opted into performance verification.” In that case, the scoring may partly track the amount of verified data a firm supplies to Forgd rather than an objective decline in execution quality.

This distinction matters for anyone using the leaderboard for decision-making. If a firm’s dataset is thinner because it has not completed verification, a low score could be as much about data availability as about market-making effectiveness. Traders and liquidity teams may therefore want to look beyond the headline rating and consider how much verified activity is reflected in a firm’s placement.

What’s next and what to watch

With Forgd’s leaderboard now embedded into DefiLlama, the main question for users is how quickly the integration improves cross-market comparability and whether verification coverage grows over time—potentially changing which firms appear toward the top. Investors and market participants should watch for how consistently uptime, depth, and spread metrics track real trading conditions, and whether new listings and opt-ins expand the reliability of the underlying index.