OKX Ventures@OKX_Ventures
The onchain RFQ vs CLOB debate dominated CT last week. RFQ in crypto now covers two completely different businesses that happen to share a name.
1. The first is the multi-maker RFQ aggregator. UniswapX, 1inch Fusion, CoW. External fillers, solvers, and MMs compete on private quotes, user takes the best fill. Economically this is what "RFQ" means in TradFi. Uniswap cleared over $1T in 2025 volume (TokenTerminal).
2. The second is a single-counterparty pool with an RFQ-style interface. One internal pool sits on the other side of every trade and hedges offchain. No external maker competition. The business model isn't TradFi RFQ at all, it's Citadel-style retail internalization: Robinhood routes flow to the wholesaler, the wholesaler internalizes, user gets a small price improvement, wholesaler pockets the spread.
Two different economic structures. Multi-maker compresses spread through competition. Single-counterparty captures spread through monopoly pricing plus cross-domain hedging.
And TradFi RFQ doesn't actually work the way most onchain pitches imply. The dealer's whole business is sitting on balance sheet, and they don't just warehouse and wait for the offsetting RFQ. They internalize against future client flow, offset in the interdealer market, hedge piecewise across correlated assets, whatever the book and the day call for. The whole loop stays off the public book and dealer PnL is compensation for carrying inventory. A maker who hedges back-to-back on a CLOB the moment a quote fills is just running a single-maker CLOB clone.
The onchain versions split along these lines too. Multi-maker inherits the competitive pricing but most makers hedge immediately rather than warehouse. Single-counterparty is its own thing entirely: retail internalization, ported onchain.
