A primer on Rujira’s CCL strategies (part 1): Democratizing access to market making
Pragmatic Musing4 min read·Just now--
Today is a very exciting day for me as we wrap up the latest RUJI Trade audit and start rolling out CCL.
Our core mission with Rujira is to level the financial playing field, giving people access to permissionless, non-custodial, and easy-to-use tools that democratize access to wealth creation.
This has been in our DNA from the very beginning, back in 2021 when we launched Orca on Terra, turning the highly gated liquidation market into an opportunity for anyone, while reducing the cost of liquidation for people on the wrong side of the trade.
This is what drew me to Kujira as a user first, and this is what drives me to build Rujira alongside Hans and our amazing team.
The great thing about being part of the team is that I get to influence what we are building. For every change, feature or strategy I suggest, the goal is always the same: to build a great product that, as a DeFi user, I really want to use over something else.
We have spent the last 1.5 years building the foundations necessary for more advanced products, and with CCL, we are finally there.
CCL strategies are the first product we deliver that let users put their assets to work through onchain market making, with the goal of generating an additional stream of income over time.
Of course, none of that is financial advice, just sharing my personal opinions and experiences.
Market Making 101
Custom Concentrated Liquidity (CCL) is an algorithmic strategy allowing you to set some parameters and let it trade 24/7 based on pre-set rules. It is 100% onchain and non-custodial, meaning you don’t rely on some centralized server to keep the strategy running, and you stay in control of your assets under the rules of the smart contract.
Fundamentally, CCL is a market making strategy, a sub-category of algorithmic strategies, trading at a fairly high frequency (lot of small trades) and targeting a small % profit on each trade. In TradeFi, market making is dominated by top investment banks and a few specialized players like Citadel and Jane Street. ChatGPT estimated a total profit of ~$85–115bn from market making activities in 2025. It is a huge, highly competitive business, usually inaccessible to everyday users.
With CCL anyone can become a market maker.
As a market maker, what you are doing is providing liquidity for other market participants, allowing them to buy and sell with ease. It’s a key function for healthy financial markets.
Within the price range you set, you will be buying when others are selling, and selling when others are buying. This makes it a mean-reversion strategy. The underlying bet you are making is that the price will keep moving up and down within your range for the duration of your investment.
If you plan to hold your position for a month, and you think price is going straight up from there, then using CCL would be a bad move. You should rather buy the asset that you think is gonna go up, hold it, and sell it for a profit one month later.
In practice, it is very hard to predict where the price will go next (especially in crypto), and it is much easier to predict that there will be volatility (especially in crypto). That is where a strategy like CCL becomes interesting: it is designed to monetize volatility rather than rely only on price direction.
Before getting into the mechanics, I think it’s worth framing the mindset.
Treat your trading as a business
If you are serious about using DeFi to generate a stream of income to complement your revenue, it helps to treat that activity like a small business:
- Plan ahead and make calculated decisions; don’t overwrite your plan based on emotions when things don’t go your way.
- Track the performance of all your positions (Rujira UI helps systematize that tracking for you).
- Reassess your plan periodically and adjust your positions based on realized data.
Taking the view of a business owner, being a market maker is about managing an inventory. Each market you decide to serve is made of a pair of assets referred to as BASE/QUOTE, for example BTC/USDC. The first token (BTC) is the base asset, the second token (USDC) is the quote asset and is the reference unit to value the base.
As a market maker, you will start with an inventory of BASE and QUOTE, and your goal is to generate an income from that inventory by managing buy and sell orders between the two assets.
You aim to generate an income by capturing a small profit called `spread ` between buy and sell orders. For example, sell 0.01 BTC at 100,000 USDC, then buy back 0.01 BTC at 99,900 USDC (0.10% spread), make a 1 USDC profit. That’s your revenue from your market making activity. Depending on how the trades execute over time, your inventory will shift between BTC and USDC, and profits can be realized in either asset.
Most pairs in crypto tend to be quoted in stablecoins, but the quote asset doesn’t necessarily have to be USDC or USDT. Rujira also offers markets quoted in BTC and RUNE for example.
This makes Rujira the only place in DeFi where you can have markets quoted in native BTC (as opposed to markets available on Ethereum and other EVM chains which can only use wrapped versions issued by centralized entities such as wBTC or cbBTC).
A decentralized market with decentralized money. Quite cool!
I’ll stop here to keep things digestible. In part 2, we’ll go deeper into CCL: what the parameters mean, how to create a position, and the practical considerations to help you get started.
