In traditional finance, providing liquidity has always been reserved for the big players. To compete you need special access, custom infrastructure, and capital.

Crypto flipped that idea with AMMs. Anyone could LP. No permission, no barriers: just connect your wallet to deposit and start earning.

With on-chain CLOBs, that simplicity disappears. We reap the benefits of a more efficient market, but inherit the properties that make providing liquidity hard.

That’s why we built Kuru Vaults. They make it simple to LP by combining an AMM with the order book. But what if you wanted more precision?

Introducing Flip Orders

Flip orders are a new type of limit order that automatically ‘flips’ liquidity on the opposite side of the book after each fill. Think of it like setting a post-fill action for your order.

Here’s how it works:

Let’s say you place a bid at $99 and set a flip price at $101.

• When your $99 bid fills, instead of giving you the asset, we instantly place a sell order at $101.

• When the $101 ask fills, we flip it back into the $99 bid.

• This cycle continues every time the order fills. Hence the name, flip orders.

We simulate the feel of concentrated liquidity without requiring frequent cancelling and posting of orders on the book.

Each fill is treated independently and flipped as soon as it’s matched. Orders stay passive and follow price-time priority like any other limit order.

This provides fine-grained control like CLMMs (ex: Uniswap v3) directly on the order book.

Placing Concentrated Liquidity on Kuru

With flip orders, creating a custom liquidity position is simple. You can batch multiple flip orders to build concentrated liquidity across any range you choose.

Here’s how it works:

• Choose your liquidity shape - Spot, Curve, or Bid/Ask.

• Set your fee by adjusting the spread between your flip prices

• Choose how much liquidity to provide

• Pick your price range on the chart

• Deploy the liquidity in one click.

Your position earns fees when your orders get filled within the selected price range.

Why Flip Orders Work?

Flip orders make LPing on the order book accessible to everyone. You do not need custom infrastructure or active management. They work especially well for pairs like LST/native or stable/stable, where tight price ranges reduce the need for professional market makers.

Orders stay live on the book with no need for constant updates— just set your range and let it earn. Liquidity remains on the book with no fragmentation.

Flip orders take us one step closer to making LPing on order books as accessible as it is on AMMs.

You get control, flexibility, and transparency, without needing to run bots or manage complex strategies.

This new DeFi primitive is now live on Kuru. Try it out and let us know what you think. We’d love your feedback!

Kuru Labs is dedicated to building the premier liquidity hub for Monad, bringing a performant central-limit orderbook to the EVM for the first time along with integrated discovery and trading terminal, user liquidity provision, and token launchpad.

Powered by Monad’s globally decentralized network, Kuru will unify liquidity across the ecosystem with our hybrid integrated CLOB-AMM model that preserves composability and democratizes access to liquidity provisioning.

Today, we are thrilled to announce our $11.6m Series A round, led by Paradigm. This funding will give us the resources we need to continue scaling our team and bring the vision of a fully on-chain orderbook to life on Monad mainnet.

Angel investors include Viktor Bunin (Credibly Neutral), Zagabond, Tristan Yver, Alex Watts, Jordan Hagan, 3nes, Will Price, Shreyas Hariharan, Auri, Joe Takayama among others.

We are grateful to all of our investors for their confidence in us, and for the vibrant Monad and Kuru communities’ continuous support.

We look forward to launching on mainnet and building the decentralized liquidity hub for the Monad ecosystem!

If you want to help us in bringing the future of finance on-chain, we are hiring: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/kuru-labs

In the second part , we took a closer look at the other side of the trade, the market makers.

We explored:

• What market makers do (and why they matter)?

• How Automated Market Makers (AMMs) work?

• And why AMMs, are simpler for providing liquidity?

If you haven’t read the previous posts, we recommend starting there, it’ll make this next part much easier to follow.

Liquidity for markets

Order books don’t work without liquidity, someone has to be on the other side of every trade.

Market makers fill this role, earning profits from the spread. On popular tokens with high trading volume, market makers are happy to jump in as it’s profitable.

But if you're a new project launching a token, it’s a different story. Hiring a professional market maker is expensive. And if your token doesn’t have enough volume, they’re not interested.

AMMs solved this to a large extent, anyone can add liquidity. But what if we could bring that flexibility to order books?

Introducing Vaults

This is why we built Vaults on Kuru.

Vaults take the simple idea behind AMMs, like the Uniswap v2 curve, and plug it into an order book.

Here’s how it works:

• The vault splits the AMM curve into many tiny orders on the book.

• It behaves like a default market maker for the market.

• Anyone can deposit tokens into a vault and instantly provide liquidity.

• For the first time, you can earn fees from an order book, just like you would with an AMM

The best part? Every market on Kuru comes with a vault!

That means you can launch a token and have instant liquidity on the order book from day one. No market maker needed. The vault will handle it.

At the same time, the market stays open to everyone. Traders can place limit orders, and professional market makers can still step in when needed. If your token gains enough traction, they will naturally join in and provide liquidity.

If you’re curious about how Vaults work under the hood, check out our technical docs.

Vaults are now live on Kuru. We would love to hear your feedback on this new feature.

Now, anyone can launch a token, provide liquidity, and start participating in order book markets from day one.

Quick recap: a Central Limit Order Book allows us to create a marketplace which can easily match a buyer and seller with the help of limit orders on the book. In our previous post we used an apple market to understand how buyers and sellers can use the book. If you remember, we used the book to record the prices that the shops wanted to buy/sell at. Let us move away from apples and use Bitcoin (BTC) going forward.

A trade is only possible if there is someone who is either buying from you or selling to you. This person is a counterparty to your trade. Now the question arises when we go to make a trade, who is the counterparty?

If you want to buy BTC, you need to find someone willing to sell it to you at the best possible price and at the exact moment you’re ready to trade. This means a seller must not only exist but also actively have an order available at the right price when you want to trade. The order book is an elegant solution, but someone has to be placing the orders on the book for you to trade against.

On centralized exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, etc.) there are orders on the book, and the people who place these orders are willing to be our counterparty. But who are these people and why are they willing to trade with us?

Enter Market Makers

In this post we will explore how market making works on AMMs and CLOBs.

A(MM) - Automated Market Makers

To make trading easier, AMMs use liquidity pools instead of an order book. Let’s say there’s a BTC/USDC pool on an AMM. People, called liquidity providers (LPs) deposit BTC and USDC into this pool, creating a shared pot of funds.

Now, imagine you have some USDC and want to buy BTC. The AMM lets you trade directly with the pool. It uses a math formula to set the price of the trade. The most common type, the Constant Function Market Maker (CFMM), adjusts prices depending on the pool's balance of assets. This automated pricing is why it’s called an Automated Market Maker.

But why would people deposit their BTC or USDC into the pool?

Every time someone trades, like when you swapped USDC for BTC, the pool charges a small fee. This fee is split among all the LPs and paid in the asset being traded—BTC or USDC. Over time, these fees can grow, making it rewarding for LPs to provide liquidity.

Market Makers

Back to order books. Just like liquidity pools in AMMs, Market Makers (MMs) ensure you can trade at any time. Let’s take a BTC/USDC market on a centralized exchange. MMs place buy and sell orders on the book, ready to be your counterparty whenever you want to trade.

For example, if you have USDC and want to buy BTC, a MM might have placed an order to sell BTC at a price they decided. These prices aren’t random—they’re based on many factors like market trends, demand, and their own strategies. Once set, the MM keeps their funds on the book at specific prices, ready to buy BTC from you or sell BTC to you.

Why would someone become a Market Maker?

The answer is spread.

What is a spread? Let us understand spreads with an example.

Assume there’s only one Market Maker (MM) in the BTC/USDC market. The MM places orders on the book, offering to sell BTC at $90,100 and buy BTC at $90,000. These prices are carefully chosen, with a $100 difference between them—this is the spread.

Now, imagine someone wants to buy 1 BTC— they look at the order book and buy it from the MM by paying $90,100. (Note: The MM was willing to sell BTC at this price)

Later, another person comes along and wants to sell 1 BTC, so they sell to the MM at $90,000. (Note: the MM was willing to buy BTC at this price)

What does the MM end up with? The MM sold 1 BTC for $90,100 and bought 1 BTC for $90,000, pocketing the $100 difference.

This spread is the MM’s reward for being your counterparty. The spread is the MMs fee for providing liquidity. Similar to LPs on AMMs getting rewarded for providing liquidity.

Market Making isn’t exactly easy

MM’s are sophisticated actors that run strategies to make the most out of this market. They truly make the market and facilitate trades for people like us. Spread is the profit they make for providing this service and liquidity to the market.

Market Makers (MMs) aim to maintain a balance—they want to sell as much BTC as they buy. If they end up with too much BTC and the price crashes, they could be stuck holding the bag, leading to losses. That’s why MMs focus on consistently doing back-and-forth buy and sell trades. This constant activity is where they make the most money.

To achieve this, MMs use strategies to decide where to place their orders and how much liquidity to provide. These systems help them adjust quickly to changes in the market, ensuring they stay profitable while managing their risks.

When multiple MMs are providing liquidity on the same market, they are competing with each other to be the one who becomes the counterparty for a trade. Remember CLOBs follow Price-Time Priority. The MMs are racing against each other to make sure their order is in front of the queue.

What’s next?

Being a liquidity provider (LP) on an AMM is much easier to understand and participate in. You deposit your assets into a pool, and the AMM takes care of the rest. Market making on an order book, however, is a far more complicated and involved process.

But what if we told you there’s a way to provide liquidity to an order book without needing to do all the hard work?

Stay tuned for the next blog in the series where we explore one of Kuru’s core innovations!

KB wants to buy some apples and goes to the market.

There are a lot of shops that are selling apples. She decides to ask a few shops the price of apples, here is what she finds out:

Looks like everyone doesn’t agree on the same price for the apples. KB doesn’t want to get a bad deal, but she’ll have to ask all the shops to find out the best price. This is going to take a long time and is exhausting.

Now, let’s talk about Molandak.

He wants to sell some apples, and he's doing the same thing as KB-- asking the shops what price they can buy his apples at. This is what Molandak notes down:

Like KB, he’s trying to find the best deal, but it’s not easy.

KB and Molandak have another problem. Some stalls can't buy all of Molandak's apples, and some can't sell KB the exact number of apples she needs.

This is starting to get a bit tricky and time-consuming. KB and Molandak spend a lot of time just to make sure they're not getting a bad deal. There must be a simpler way, right?

Clobby to the rescue

Clobby has been watching this from the side and understands this problem. He comes up with an idea. He decides to visit all the shops and note down the price that each shop is offering, for both buying and selling.

This is what the book looks like:

It turns out that some shops are willing to buy and sell more apples than others, so he notes them down with an additional column called “Quantity”.

This seems helpful. Clobby shows this to KB and Molandak, and they love the idea.

It would be easier if the prices were arranged from best to worst. They want the best deal possible. For KB that means buying apples from the shop that offers the lowest price. For Molandak it means selling his apples to the shop that offers the highest price.

Clobby understands and changes this on his book.

If anyone comes to the market in the future, they can look at Clobby’s book and find the shops that trade at the best price quickly.

Looks like a very clean solution, right?

So, what is a CLOB?

This is exactly what a Central Limit Order Book, or CLOB is. Exchanges maintain a CLOB for each market. In our story it was apples and USD, but you would’ve seen BTC/USDT or ETH/USDC on other exchanges.

Users are free to come and place limit orders onto the book. A limit order contains the following information:

• Type: Buy or Sell (is the shop willing to buy or sell apples?)

• Price: What price do they want to buy/sell at (prices that the shops are willing to trade at)

• Quantity: How much of the asset do they want to buy/sell (in this story apples, but could be any asset like BTC or ETH)

• Time: At what time was the order placed? This is something that the exchange keeps track of, the user doesn’t have to specify this.

Here are two examples of orders from Shop Z and Shop A.

An order book has two sides, Bids and Asks

• Bids are a list of all the buy orders on the book

• Asks are a list of all the sell orders on the book

This is a screenshot of an order book from a crypto exchange.

It looks slightly different than our order book.

Order books can be visualised in multiple ways, but common ones are vertical and side-by-side. In our story asks and bids are being shown next to each other. This is the side-by-side view. Most exchanges however stack asks and bids vertically (ladder). In a vertical view, the prices are arranged in a descending order from highest on the top to lowest at the bottom.

Price Time Priority

An order book allows traders to find the best deal on the market. To make this easier, orders in the book are sorted according to a concept called Price Time Priority.

You’ll notice bids (buy orders) are sorted with the highest price on top (the highest price someone is willing to buy at) and the asks (sell orders) are sorted with the lowest price on top (the lowest price someone is willing to sell at). This is called Price Priority.

The highest priced buy order is called the best bid and the lowest priced sell order is called best ask. In our story, best bid was at $7 and the best ask was at $8.

What happens if there are two orders at the same price?

We give higher priority to orders that came in earlier, like a queue. This is Time Priority.

Here are the asks and the corresponding time that each order was written on the book. There are two orders at $8, one came at 1:45 pm and the other at 2:15 pm. The earlier one is placed on top of the later one.

An interesting thing to note: the $9 order came at 1:15 pm, earlier than the best ask (i.e $8 order at 1:45 pm). But we don’t place it on top. We give higher priority to better price (in this case $8) than time. Only if there are two similarly priced orders, we look at the time to decide which order goes in front of the queue.

This is how we maintain Price and Time Priority

Market orders

In the apples story above, KB and Molandak had no particular price in mind. They were willing to trade at the best price that the market had to offer. These are known as market orders.

Market orders contain the same information as limit orders, but usually contain no price or time.

When a market order comes in, they get matched against the orders sitting on the book.

KB wanted to buy 20 apples.

• Step 1 - The best price she can get is $8. But that shop is only willing to sell 10 apples. So she buys 10 apples from there. She still needs to buy 10 more apples

• Step 2 - Now the best price is $9. That shop can sell 20 apples, but KB needs only 10 more apples (she got 10 from the previous shop in Step 1). She can buy 10 more apples from here at $9.

• Step 3 - KB now has the 20 apples she wanted

KB is taking 10 apples for $8 and 10 apples for $9. Notice that the best selling price is now $9.

Similarly let us look at Molandak trying to sell 15 apples.

• Step 1 - The highest price he can sell is $7. But that shop is only willing to buy 10 apples. So he sells 10 apples. He’s left with 5 more apples to sell.

• Step 2 - Next highest price is $6. That shop can buy 20 apples, but Molandak has only 5 more apples to sell (remember he sold 10 apples in Step 1 to another shop). He can sell his remaining 5 apples at $6.

• Step 3 - Molandak has now sold the 15 apples.

Molandak is taking dollars from the shops in return for his apples. Notice that the best buying price is $6.

The user placing the market order is known as a taker, since they are taking assets (apples) from the orderbook. Conversely, a user placing resting limit orders is know as a maker, since they are making the market. Without them the book would just be empty.

Remember the shops in our story? They were willing to buy and sell apples. These shops were allowing traders like KB and Molandak to come and trade freely at any point. In crypto as well, there are market makers who are willing to both buy and sell the asset.

Why do they do this? What does the market maker get in return? We’ll talk more about this in the next blog.

s/o to Tequila, Reinn and JoNADthan, the amazing artists from our community for bringing our blog to life.

Today, Kuru is announcing our $2 million seed round, led by Electric Capital with participation from Brevan Howard Digital, CMS Holdings, Pivot Global, Breed, Velocity Capital, Purple and notable angel investors including Keone Hon, Jarry Xiao, and Eugene Chen.

This round of funding reflects our backers’ strong conviction in our team, our technology, and our mission of building the future of finance on-chain. 

Why orderbooks?

Today, Automated Market Makers (AMMs) facilitate between $4 billion and $9 billion in daily trading volume. They have been pivotal to the growth of DeFi, but despite their popularity and dominance, they come with limitations like underutilized liquidity and high slippage. 

These protocols now allow users to concentrate liquidity, leading to much higher capital efficiency. Newer versions are slowly converging towards something that behaves more like a Central Limit Order Book (CLOB).

CLOBs advance beyond AMMs by enabling market makers to actively quote liquidity, offering users better prices and lower slippage. 

If CLOBs are so great, why don’t we have CLOB DEXs yet?

For an orderbook to function effectively, the underlying blockchain must offer quick block times and affordable gas fees. Today's EVM chains are generally either too slow, too expensive, or both.

Enter Monad

Monad plans to have a TPS of ~10,000 and a 1 second block finality. This will result in significantly lower transaction costs and faster block times compared to current EVM chains.

For the first time, this makes a fully functional CLOB on the EVM feasible, allowing market makers to frequently update their quotes without having to worry about transaction costs (gas fees) and slow block times.

Kuru, the first fully on-chain CLOB

Kuru is trying to close the gap between decentralized and centralized exchanges with a completely on-chain orderbook. Users will get the best of both worlds with slippage, self-custody and composability.

Kuru’s contracts have been optimized for the EVM and designed for market makers allowing them to place/cancel limit orders at a low, constant gas cost. This leads to tighter spreads and more liquidity on our books.

The aim is to completely replace the need for AMMs. Kuru will support both liquid and long-tail assets on the exchange, while keeping the process of providing liquidity simple. Active liquidity is vital for the orderbook. But expecting market makers to handle the flood of new coins every day isn't realistic. We are working on solutions to allow users to passively provide liquidity onto the orderbooks.

We want to redefine the on-chain trading experience, not just build another DEX. Today, a trader must navigate multiple platforms to discover, research, and trade coins. Kuru simplifies this by consolidating these actions in a single interface. Traditionally, DEXs (ex: Raydium and Uniswap) have been disconnected from trading interfaces (ex: telegram bots, Photon, Bullx etc.). We are bridging this gap, making it easier for everyone to discover and trade their favourite assets.

Join our community

Over the next few months, as we gear up for the launch of Monad’s testnet and mainnet, we'll be sharing more about how Kuru works under the hood. 

Join us on our journey and help us build Kuru:

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