Auto-Maker: Passive Market Making
How to use the Auto-Maker in Electrum-Mars to automatically create and manage atomic swap offers. Earn BTC commissions while providing liquidity to the Marscoin ecosystem.
What Is the Auto-Maker?
The Auto-Maker transforms your Electrum-Mars wallet into a passive market maker. Instead of manually creating individual swap offers, you configure a few parameters and let the Auto-Maker handle everything:
- Fetches live prices from CoinMarketCap (via price.marscoin.org) and Bitcoin pricing from mempool.space
- Creates tiered offers — multiple offers of increasing size, each with a slightly different fee
- Refreshes automatically — reprices and republishes offers every 5 minutes based on current market rates
- Responds to competition — adjusts pricing when other sellers are on the order book
- Executes swaps automatically — when someone accepts an offer, the SwapWorker handles the entire settlement
- Respects your limits — daily volume caps, maximum per-swap amounts, and a reserve percentage to keep a portion of your balance unlocked
The result is an always-on liquidity point that earns you BTC commissions every time someone buys MARS through one of your offers.
Setting Up the Auto-Maker
Step 1: Open the Auto-Maker Dialog
Click the Auto-Maker button in the Atomic Swap tab. The configuration dialog appears.
Step 2: Enter Your BTC Receive Address
This is required — the Auto-Maker will not start without it. Enter a Bitcoin address where you want to receive your BTC earnings. This should be an address you control in any Bitcoin wallet (Exodus, Sparrow, hardware wallet, etc.).
The address is saved between sessions. You only need to enter it once.
Step 3: Configure Your Settings
| Setting | Default | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum fee (%) | 5.0% | Your profit floor — the smallest offer uses this exact fee. You will never sell below this margin. |
| Daily limit (MARS) | 10,000 | Maximum MARS you’ll sell in a 24-hour period. Resets daily. |
| Max per swap (MARS) | 1,000 | Largest single offer. Limits your exposure to any one swap. |
| Min per swap (MARS) | 10 | Smallest offer. Prevents dust-sized swaps that aren’t worth the on-chain fees. |
| Reserve (%) | 20% | Percentage of your balance kept unlocked. If you have 1,000 MARS and reserve is 20%, only 800 MARS is available for offers. |
| Concurrent offers | 3 | How many offers to maintain simultaneously. More offers = more price points for buyers. |
| Price refresh | 5 minutes | How often to fetch new market prices and refresh offers. |
Step 4: Click “Start Auto-Maker”
A confirmation dialog appears. Once confirmed, the Auto-Maker begins its first cycle immediately: fetching prices, computing tiers, and publishing offers.
The status bar below the toolbar buttons shows:
Auto-Maker ACTIVE — Fee: 8.0% | Offers: 3 | Available: 1170.50 MARS | Earned: 0.00000000 BTC | Rate: 0.0000004142 BTC/MARS
How Tiered Pricing Works
The Auto-Maker doesn’t create identical offers. It builds an order book with ascending tiers — smaller offers at tighter spreads, larger offers at wider spreads.
Why tiers?
- Small offers attract first-time buyers. Someone who has never used an atomic swap before wants to try with a small amount. A tight spread (low fee) makes this attractive.
- Large offers deserve a premium. Selling 500 MARS ties up more of your balance for longer and carries more risk. A wider spread compensates for that exposure.
- It looks like a real exchange. Multiple price points at different sizes create depth in the order book, signaling active liquidity.
Example: 1,500 MARS with 8% minimum fee and 3 offers
| Tier | MARS Amount | Fee | BTC Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 (small) | ~250 | 8.0% | Best deal for buyers |
| 2 (medium) | ~500 | 10.0% | Mid-range |
| 3 (large) | ~750 | 12.0% | Premium |
The tiers use an ascending weight system (1:2:3 ratio), so the smallest offer is one-sixth of the total and the largest is half. The fee scales linearly from your minimum (8%) up to approximately +4 percentage points above it.
Competitive Pricing
When other sellers have offers on the order book, the Auto-Maker adjusts:
- It checks all competing offers and finds the best (lowest) rate
- If your offers are priced higher than the competition, it narrows the gap by up to 50%
- Your minimum fee is sacred — competition can compress your premium tiers but never push you below the floor you set
This means you don’t need to constantly check what others are charging. The Auto-Maker positions you competitively while protecting your stated minimum margin.
The Heartbeat System
Auto-Maker offers have a short lifespan (15 minutes by default) and are refreshed every 5 minutes. This serves as a heartbeat: if your wallet goes offline (crash, shutdown, network loss), your offers disappear from the order book within 15 minutes.
This protects takers from accepting offers from offline makers. The block explorer dashboard shows a last_seen timestamp for each offer, so buyers can verify the maker is actively online before committing BTC.
Monitoring Your Auto-Maker
Status Bar
The green status bar below the toolbar shows real-time stats:
- Fee — your minimum fee setting
- Offers — number of active offers
- Available — MARS available for offers (after reserve)
- Earned — total BTC earned from completed swaps
- Rate — current market rate being used
Earnings Summary
Open the Auto-Maker dialog anytime to see cumulative statistics:
- Total BTC earned
- Total MARS sold
- Swaps completed
- Amount sold today vs. daily limit
Active Swaps Tab
When a taker accepts one of your auto-generated offers, it appears in the Active Swaps tab just like a manual offer. The status labels show exactly what’s happening:
- “Buyer accepted! Funding MARS…”
- “MARS locked. Waiting for BTC…”
- “BTC received! Claiming…”
- “Complete! BTC received.”
Practical Considerations
Wallet must stay open
The Auto-Maker runs as a background task inside Electrum-Mars. If you close the wallet, the auto-maker stops, offers expire in 15 minutes, and no new swaps can begin. Active swaps that are already in progress will resume when you reopen.
If the wallet was running with the Auto-Maker enabled and gets restarted (update, reboot), the Auto-Maker resumes automatically on the next launch — no need to click Start again.
Balance changes
As swaps complete, your MARS balance decreases and the Auto-Maker automatically adjusts. Fewer MARS available means smaller tiers, fewer offers, or no offers if you drop below the 200 MARS minimum threshold. When new MARS arrives (from mining, transfers, or the other side of a two-way market), the Auto-Maker scales back up.
Multiple wallets
You can run the Auto-Maker on multiple wallets simultaneously, each with different settings. Each wallet acts as an independent market maker with its own offers, limits, and BTC receive address.
Tax considerations
Every completed swap is a taxable event in most jurisdictions. The BTC you receive is income at the fair market value at the time of receipt. Electrum-Mars does not provide tax reporting — consult a tax professional and keep records of your swap history (available in the History tab).
Recommended Starting Configuration
For a wallet with approximately 1,000-2,000 MARS:
| Setting | Recommended | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum fee | 5-8% | Covers price volatility and on-chain fees |
| Daily limit | 5,000 MARS | Conservative cap while testing |
| Max per swap | 500 MARS | Limits exposure per trade |
| Min per swap | 20 MARS | Below this, fees eat the profit |
| Reserve | 20% | Keeps a safety cushion |
| Concurrent offers | 3-5 | Good depth without overwhelming the book |
| Price refresh | 5 minutes | Frequent enough for market tracking |
As you gain confidence, you can increase limits, tighten the fee, and add more concurrent offers to create deeper liquidity.
Why This Matters
Every wallet running the Auto-Maker is a decentralized exchange point. There is no central server, no company, no single point of failure. The order book lives across all ElectrumX servers. The settlement happens directly between maker and taker wallets via hash time-locked contracts on the Bitcoin and Marscoin blockchains.
For Marscoin, this solves the fundamental liquidity problem that plagues every small-cap cryptocurrency: the difficulty of getting listed on exchanges, maintaining market maker relationships, and depending on third-party infrastructure that can disappear overnight.
With the Auto-Maker, liquidity is a community resource. Every Marscoin holder with a desktop wallet and an internet connection can contribute to it — and earn a commission for doing so.
The Auto-Maker is currently in alpha. The core swap mechanics are proven on mainnet, but the pricing algorithm and competitive awareness features are new. The Marscoin Foundation recommends starting with conservative limits and monitoring your first few auto-swaps. All swap funds are protected by hash time-locked contracts — if anything goes wrong, both parties can always refund after the timelock expires.
