Sponsor economics on Qualiq.

1. The question this page answers

If you issue tokenized US equities, run a perp DEX listing them, or operate a treasury that pays for execution quality on a basket of names — should you fund a Qualiq sponsor budget, and at what size?

• Who pays for liquidity today? Issuers (Backed Finance, Securitize, Dinari), exchanges (Lighter, Hyperliquid deployers), platform operators (Jupiter, Phantom). The bill is paid in MM rebates, token emissions, bond costs, and integration revenue shares.
• What does the bill look like? Public examples below. The order of magnitude is $0.5M–$5M / year per pair if you want a quotable inside market.
• What does Qualiq change? It moves the bill from opaque per-MM deals into a public, scored, sponsor-funded budget. Same dollars, but spent on measurable execution quality with on-chain auditability.

2. How a sponsor uses Qualiq — the mechanic

The SponsorBudget account is the focal primitive. The flow:

1. Sponsor codifies a market on-chain. Pair (e.g., TSLAx/USDC), KPI weights (spread, depth, uptime, fill-quality), epoch duration (1 minute default).
2. Sponsor funds a budget in USDC via fund_sponsor_budget. The funded amount is the protocol's committed payout cap. Sponsor retains custody-equivalent control: budget can be withdrawn (after a notice period), paused, or rolled forward unspent.
3. The scoring service grades every fill against the codified KPIs. Per-maker scores accumulate over each epoch.
4. At epoch close, the scorer publishes a Merkle root on-chain. Each maker's reward is a leaf — proportional to their score.
5. Makers claim with a Merkle proof against claim_rewards. The protocol verifies, pays out, decrements the budget. No human in the loop. No discretionary discount, no shadow tier.
6. Unspent budget rolls forward by default. Sponsors don't pay for idle markets. (If a sponsor wants the budget consumed regardless — to keep makers warm — they set an epoch_min_distribution floor.)

Two protocol-level fee streams sit on this flow, both visible on-chain:

• Platform fee on the budget (Stream B): a configurable bps the platform retains at fund_sponsor_budget time. Default 2.5%; waivable for early sponsors.
• Protocol fee on filled volume (Stream A): a tiered bps from each fill (intro/standard/full tiers based on cumulative volume per market).

What the sponsor cannot do: pay a specific maker, override the score, prevent a maker from claiming, or hide the leaderboard. Every spend is auditable on-chain. That property is the product.

3. The unit economics — what does $1 of sponsor budget buy?

The relevant metric is cost per basis point of spread improvement on quotable size, denominated in dollars per (bps × $1k notional × 1 day).

Worked example, using Qualiq's 90-day historical replay:

Pair

TSLAx/USDC

Sampled volume

$3.75M over 60 days

AMM avg spread

23.14 bps

Qualiq counterfactual avg spread

~5.05 bps

Spread improvement

18.09 bps median savings per fill

User savings

$18,388 net of gas (annualized ≈ $112k)

To produce that improvement, makers need an incentive sufficient to carry inventory risk, cover infra costs, and earn an acceptable rate of return relative to a typical TradFi rebate seat. A reasonable maker-target ROI: 8–15% on capital deployed.

For a maker holding ~$250k of TSLAx + $250k of USDC float to quote both sides at min size, that's $40k–$75k annual revenue per maker per pair to stay committed. With three competing makers per pair, break-even sponsor budget for one pair is $120k–$225k / year.

Optimal (to hit ~5 bps and keep worse_than_amm_pct < 20%) sits at ~$250k / year per pair — matching Lighter's $250k/week distributed across many MM-pairs.

What ~$250k / year buys the sponsor:

• ~$112k of measured direct user savings.
• Aggregator-routing tailwind (Jupiter routes to the venue with the best public quote).
• Brand-level "issuer-of-record provides quality liquidity" positioning vs. the "tokenization without dealer depth" anti-pattern.

The case is second-order, not 1-to-1 dollar-on-dollar. Better execution → more flow → more issuer fees → more depth → tighter spreads. Lighter, MarketAxess, and Tradeweb all run on the same virtuous cycle at different scales.

4. Precedents — TradFi and crypto

4.1 TradFi

The pattern across all five: a venue funds a quality budget. Dealers compete on execution metrics. The venue's flow becomes more attractive as a function of the budget. Spread compensation is the explicit cost of operating an inside market.

4.2 Crypto

Same pattern as TradFi, except budgets are paid in protocol-native tokens / explicit USD / bond capital, and the dealer side is fragmented across MM teams chasing emissions rather than competing on quality scores.

4.3 What's different about Qualiq

5. A worked sponsor case — TSLAx issuer

You're a tokenized-stock issuer offering TSLAx and a half-dozen other names on Solana. Today your liquidity is mostly Raydium CLMM (LP'd by passive capital chasing fees) with one or two MMs cross-quoting on the side.

Current state (no Qualiq)

• AMM avg spread on TSLAx: 23 bps.
• Sampled 60-day volume: $3.75M.
• User cost of bad spread: ~$8,650 over the window in spread vs. NBBO mid.
• Your direct cost: zero — but your flow is suboptimal, your aggregator routing is mediocre, your secondary issuance is harder to defend to compliance, and your competitors (Securitize's closed-loop stack) outperform on visible quote tightness.

With Qualiq, $250k / year sponsor budget on TSLAx alone

• Target spread: 5 bps. Achievable per the replay evidence and mm-emavol config.
• Direct user savings: ~$112k / year on $7.5M annualized volume.
• Aggregator routing tilt: Jupiter routes to your venue when your quote is best — measured, not promised.
• Brand: you become the issuer-of-record with the public scoring leaderboard.
• Recourse: you control the budget cap, withdrawal notice, and KPI weights. No three-party negotiation.

Break-even logic

• $250k outlay
• ~$112k direct user savings as your "marketing budget for quality"
• Aggregator-routed flow uplift (~25% additional volume) → +$30k issuer fees
• Defensible brand vs. closed-loop stacks — unquantifiable but explicit

The case doesn't pencil on direct savings alone — it pencils on the package: marketing budget + flow uplift + competitive moat. The TradFi SLP precedent runs on identical math.

Scaling beyond one pair

Each additional pair: marginal cost ~$150–$250k / year (the second benefits from cold-start MM relationships established for the first). A 5-name basket: ~$1M / year. That's an order of magnitude smaller than the $25M HYPE bond a HIP-3 deployer locks for a single perp market.

6. Why is now the right time for sponsors to engage?

Three forcing functions:

1. Closed-loop competition is ratifying the model. Securitize × Jump × Jupiter (2026-05-05) is the proof-of-concept for "you need a dealer underneath; integrated stacks are how you get one." Qualiq is the open-network counterpart. Sponsors who don't want a single-MM dependency need an alternative now, before the closed-loop pattern entrenches.
2. Aggregator routing is converging on scoreable surfaces. Jupiter is moving toward routing on observable quote quality; on-chain scoring becomes the proof. Sponsors who fund a Qualiq budget get the routing tailwind for free.
3. Sponsor-funded dealer programs are publicly normalized. Lighter's $250k/week, HIP-3 bond economics, and the NYSE SLP precedent collectively mean no compliance officer or board will balk at a Qualiq sponsor budget — it's exactly the model they recognize from TradFi.

7. How to start as a sponsor

1. Pick one pair you care about — TSLAx, NVDAx, AAPLx, GLDx, an index.
2. Read the replay at qualiq.xyz/research for that pair. The counterfactual numbers are your projection of post-sponsorship spread.
3. Talk to us. Sponsor budgets are denominated in USDC. Early-sponsor allocation includes:
   • 50% platform-fee waiver on the budget retention (Stream B).
   • Co-design of the KPI weights for your specific market.
   • First-mover share of the public scoring leaderboard.
4. Fund a pilot at $25k–$50k / week. Run for one epoch month. Measure: did the average spread tighten? Did aggregator routing share shift? Did worse_than_amm_pct move?
5. Decide whether to scale. All inputs and outputs are public, on-chain, and reproducible.

The pilot bar deliberately matches Lighter's MM-side outlay shape, so sponsors who already understand crypto-native MM rebates can model Qualiq's surface in their familiar units.

8. What this page deliberately does not claim

• Not "Qualiq replaces your MM relationships." We provide an open competitive surface; if your incumbent MM is best, they win the budget.
• Not "this is risk-free." Maker risk, NBBO drift, and reference-feed correlation breakdowns are real. The worst-fills surface tracks the failures.
• Not "this beats every alternative for every sponsor." If you can fund a $25M HYPE bond and prefer a captive perp DEX, that's a different product. If you can renegotiate Jump's prop-AMM allocation every quarter, the closed-loop stack is a working alternative. Qualiq is the open-network option.