Market-Making Program overview
The Market-Making Program offers tiered fee rebates based on 30-day rolling trading volume. Fee tier structure:
Negative maker fees represent rebates — the exchange pays the market maker for each maker order filled.
Futures market making has separate entry requirements and rebate tiers:
For current tier breakpoints across all volume levels, see the Market-Making Program page.
Worked example — MM Program best tier (-0.012% maker):
- Colocation access (Frankfurt and Tokyo regions)
- Dedicated account manager
- Cross-marketing support
- Sub-accounts for strategy separation
- Access to Liquidity Provision program for non-MM liquidity partnerships
Colocation setup
Colocation provides low-latency API access from AWS infrastructure co-located with the WhiteBIT matching engine. Regions:
The account manager provides the specific AWS region, availability zone, and connection endpoints during onboarding.
Performance: 3-5 milliseconds latency from colocation infrastructure.
EC2 sizing recommendations:
- Network: up to 10Gbit bandwidth
- CPU: minimum 4 vCPU cores
- Low-performance VPS instances result in higher latency
Available colocation endpoints
The colocation infrastructure exposes 33 endpoints organized into three categories: spot trading (15), collateral trading for both Margin and Futures (14), and utility (4).Spot trading (15 endpoints)
Collateral / Margin and Futures trading (14 endpoints)
API naming convention: WhiteBIT’s API uses “collateral” endpoints for both Margin and Futures trading. The market pair determines the product: spot pairs (e.g.,
BTC_USDT) for Margin, perpetual pairs (e.g., BTC_PERP) for Futures. All endpoints under /api/v4/order/collateral/ and /api/v4/collateral-account/ serve both products.Utility (4 endpoints)
For endpoints not listed above, use the standard WhiteBIT API at
https://whitebit.com.
Quoting strategy
Quoting on WhiteBIT pairs a single REST call —POST /api/v4/order/bulk, up to 20 limit orders per request — with the depth and bookTicker WebSocket channels for price input.
Bulk limit orders: POST /api/v4/order/bulk — place up to 20 limit orders in a single API call. Each order item can set rpi: true to enable Retail Price Improvement mode — post-only by design, not visible in public depth feeds, and incompatible with ioc. See the API Reference.
Real-time orderbook: Subscribe to the depth WebSocket channel for real-time orderbook updates. See the WebSocket Quickstart.
Order modify: POST /api/v4/order/modify — change an existing order’s price, amount, or activation price. The matching engine internally cancels the original order and creates a replacement with a new orderId, so modify does NOT preserve queue priority. Use clientOrderId as the stable identifier across modifications. Identify the target by orderId OR clientOrderId — never both. See the API Reference.
Kill-switch (circuit breaker): POST /api/v4/order/kill-switch — sets a timeout; if the endpoint is not called again before it expires, the kill-switch cancels every active order on the account. The deadman trigger for process crashes, lost connectivity, and operator absence. See the API Reference.
- Configuration: set the timeout period; the timer resets on each API call to the kill-switch endpoint
- Scope: pass the optional
typesarray ("spot","margin","futures") to restrict the breaker to a subset of order types — useful when running spot market-making alongside futures positions you do not want to kill - Check status:
POST /api/v4/order/kill-switch/status— see the API Reference
stp mode passed at order placement. The default mode (no) allows self-trades, which is usually not what a two-sided quoter wants. See Self-Trade Prevention for the available modes.
- curl
- Python
WebSocket workflow for market making
The market-making loop runs on real-time WebSocket data, not REST polling. Quote inputs arrive ondepth (deep book) or bookTicker (top of book); inventory state arrives on balanceSpot; fill confirmations arrive on deals (executions) and ordersPending (state transitions including partial fills and cancels). Wire those four channels together to close the loop: market data drives the quote, REST order/bulk or order/modify places it, ordersPending confirms the state transition, deals confirms the fill, balanceSpot confirms the inventory delta, and the loop recomputes.
The protocol primitives — connect, ping/pong, authorize, exponential-backoff reconnection, and the query-then-subscribe recovery pattern — are covered end-to-end in the WebSocket Quickstart.
Futures additions. When quoting perpetuals (e.g.
BTC_PERP), add two more channels:
Canonical subscribe set (spot MM). Send these messages after the
authorize handshake — the three private subscriptions will be rejected on an unauthenticated socket. For multi-symbol MM, repeat each *_subscribe per market or use the multiple-subscription flag where supported (see the depth subscribe parameters).
ordersPending_subscribe takes a flat array of markets, deals_subscribe takes a single-element array containing the array of markets. The full schema lives in asyncapi/private/deals.yaml (rendered as the Deals channel page).
For the full reconnect-with-fresh-token + auto-resubscribe pattern that wraps these subscriptions in production, see WS Quickstart — Reconnection and state recovery and the worked grid-bot example in the Bot Guide.
Infrastructure best practices
Three pieces are load-bearing in production: how the account is partitioned across strategies, how the socket recovers when it drops, and how requests stay under per-endpoint limits. Sub-accounts for strategy separation: Use sub-accounts to isolate different trading strategies or pair groups. Each sub-account has independent balances and can have dedicated API keys; transfers between sub-accounts are fee-free. Worked example: run the BTC_USDT spot MM book in one sub-account funded with its own USDT balance, and a directional ETH_USDT swing book in a second sub-account with its own balance and leverage limit. A drawdown that wipes the swing book’s collateral cannot pull capital from the MM book — the MM bot keeps quoting on its untouched balance, and the swing book’s API key has no authority over the MM sub-account. WebSocket connection management:- Authenticate after connecting: fetch a token via
POST /api/v4/profile/websocket_token(rate limit: 10 requests per 60 seconds — cache the token across reconnects within its lifetime), then send{"id": N, "method": "authorize", "params": ["<token>", "public"]}on the socket. On{"result": {"status": "success"}}, subscribe to private channels such asbalanceSpot,ordersPending, anddeals - Implement automatic reconnection with exponential backoff
- Re-subscribe to all channels after reconnection
- Use the ping/pong mechanism to detect stale connections
- After reconnecting, reconcile local state: call
POST /api/v4/ordersfor the current active set andPOST /api/v4/trade-account/executed-historyfor fills since the last-seen ID. Do not assume in-memory state survived the disconnect - See the WebSocket Quickstart for a full connection + auth example
- Rate limits vary per endpoint — check Rate Limits for per-endpoint values
- Use bulk orders (
/order/bulk) to reduce request count: 20 orders per call vs. 20 individual calls - Use WebSocket for market data instead of polling REST endpoints
- Maintain a per-endpoint token bucket sized to the limits in Rate Limits; back off when the bucket empties rather than retrying after a 429
Monitoring and safety
Set the kill-switch first; everything below is the loop that keeps it reset, the manual cancel that overrides it, and the balance and fee surfaces the loop reads from. Kill-switch configuration: Set the kill-switch timeout as the first action after connecting. Configure the timeout based on the maximum acceptable unmonitored period for the system. Reset the timer with each regular API call to the kill-switch endpoint. If the system crashes or loses connectivity, the kill-switch cancels all orders after the timeout expires. Emergency cancel:POST /api/v4/order/cancel/all — cancel every open order synchronously. Use the optional market field to scope to a single pair and the type array to scope to "spot", "margin", or "futures"; omit both to cancel everything on the account. This is the “big red button” for live traders; the kill-switch is the deadman timer for when you are not there. See the API Reference.
- curl
- Python
balanceSpot channel for real-time balance updates, or poll POST /api/v4/trade-account/balance for periodic checks. Monitor for unexpected balance changes.
Fee tracking: Use POST /api/v4/market/fee to pull the account’s global maker and taker fees plus any per-pair custom fees — the market request parameter is currently ignored, so the endpoint returns fees for all markets regardless. Filter the per-pair custom_fee map client-side. Fee tiers are based on 30-day rolling volume — monitor tier changes as volume accumulates. Look up tier breakpoints on the VIP program page or the trading fees page.
Self-Trade Prevention: Understand the STP mode active on the account. Two-sided quoters hit STP frequently when bid and ask orders overlap. See Self-Trade Prevention for the available modes and behavior.
What’s Next
Colocation
AWS regions, EC2 sizing, and availability-zone placement for the Frankfurt and Tokyo zones.
Spot Trading API
Full endpoint documentation for all spot trading endpoints.
Self-Trade Prevention
STP modes and behavior for two-sided quoting.