Surge Litepaper

Surge

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We’re excited to present the Surge Litepaper. Surge is a non-custodial market-making platform built for the Cardano blockchain. Cardano’s strongest opportunity for growth and adoption lies in increasing on-chain activity. Surge is built to address this.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Project Goals
3. Platform Overview
4. Team
5. Roadmap
6. Conclusion

1. Introduction

Cardano’s technical and ideological foundations are, in many respects, the greatest in the cryptocurrency space. Deservedly, it’s ecosystem is thriving with skilled developers, innovative DApps, and a purpose-driven community. There is one critical area, however, where Cardano underperforms: on-chain activity. Raising this key metric is likely the highest ROI action that the ecosystem as a whole can take, one that has the potential to accelerate Cardano to the state of global adoption for which it’s destined.

Cardano’s scarce activity is confounding, but one thing is for certain–activity begets activity. The rest of the cryptocurrency space has long understood this, and so embraced a form of trade automation known as “Market Making”. The results are clear.

Solana, Ethereum, Base, and other leading ecosystems routinely see on-chain activity ranging from $500 million to far over $1 billion per day. Cardano, by contrast, averages roughly $2 million per day — a rounding error by comparison.

Market making isn’t just a contributor to the activity on these chains–it accounts for the majority of it. The downstream effects are felt across their ecosystems: higher token valuations, major CEX listings, global visibility, and most critically adoption. These outcomes create a self-reinforcing cycle of more users, products, and momentum.

Cardano trails in these metrics and the community feels it. The tools to unlock this final stage of growth have been missing. The foundation is set, the fundamentals are strong, and the community is ready. It’s time for Cardano to embrace market making as essential infrastructure.

Welcome to Surge.

Built from the ground up for Cardano, Surge is a market-making platform designed to catalyze ecosystem-wide growth. It reflects the values of decentralization, accessibility, and community coordination that define Cardano. Unlike traditional market-making solutions on other chains–often centralized and selective–Surge is fully democratized. It enables any project, team, or individual to participate in market making without reliance on third parties. By making this essential infrastructure permissionless and non-custodial, Surge empowers Cardano’s community to collectively chart a competitive path towards the most active ecosystems in the blockchain industry.

Market Making Fundamentals

Market making is the practice of executing trades on exchanges with the the primary goals of tightening effective spreads, increasing activity, and supporting resilient price action. It is important to note that market making services are different than AMM (Automated Market Maker) exchanges. AMM exchanges have the objective of setting a price based on asset ratios in a liquidity pool, whereas market making services strategically trade through these pools by placing buy and sell orders. By achieving their goals of reducing volatility and boosting activity, market makers help foster a vibrant token environment that drives adoption. Market makers are not exchanges, but rather platforms that execute trades on exchanges on behalf of teams and individuals.

2. Project Goals

1. Deliver Market-Making Infrastructure to Cardano: Empower projects across Cardano to utilize the market making tools that other chains have embraced for years, allowing Cardano to compete on a global scale in terms of activity.
2. Shift Market Making Toward a Permissionless, Decentralized, and Non-Custodial Model: Make market making a tool that any team or individual can use–instantly, without permission, and without code. We believe market making on Cardano shouldn’t require centralized gatekeepers or major financial backing. Funds, wallets, and strategies stay and run locally.
3. Drive Listings, Visibility, and Adoption of Cardano: Strengthen Cardano’s position in the industry through increased activity–a metric that can push the entire ecosystem closer to major exchange listings, greater user momentum, and broader recognition.

3. Platform Overview

Surge is a market-making platform that allows anyone to generate Cardano wallets, build trade schedules, and visualize the automatic execution of those schedules on Cardano DEXs. The user-friendly interface is accessed through a web browser, and users manage their Surge accounts via a Cardano dApp wallet. The platform is non-custodial, with all activity running securely and locally on the user’s machine.

Surge will launch with schedule-based automation. Conditions-based automation will be introduced following our V1 launch, enabling dynamic trades execution based on market conditions such as price action, trading volume, and pool depth. This roll out will give Cardano teams access to full, professional-grade market-making capabilities while maintaining the user-friendly, non-custodial experience that defines Surge.

Key Features

• Multi-Wallet Generation: Quickly generate hundreds of wallets locally in seconds. All keys remain private and are securely managed by your connected admin wallet.
• Fund and Balance Multiple Wallets Simultaneously: Easily fund multiple wallets in a single transaction. Surge’s auto-balancing features keep your wallets properly distributed for smooth, uninterrupted script execution.
• Build Trading Scripts with Automatic Execution: Easily create trading scripts using Surge’s intuitive interface, import custom CSVs, or generate schedules with integrated AI tools. Once activated, scripts execute automatically through Minswap (with more DEXs/aggregators coming soon) and can be paused or adjusted at any time.
• Manage and Analyze: Set precise Net Buy/Sell targets to control your script’s net ADA gain or loss — independent of total trade volume. Monitor real-time performance, profit/loss, DEX fees, and wallet activity through a streamlined dashboard. Edit scripts, pause or delete them, and maintain full control over every aspect of your Surge setup.
• Simple, Use-Case Driven UX: Surge is built to be straightforward: create wallets, automate trades, stay in control. Ideal for both experienced teams and those just starting with market making.

Example User Experience

A Cardano project wants to boost its token’s activity and visibility. In this example, the team allocates 100,000 ADA. Surge scales to any capital amount. Here’s how it works:

1. Team member(s) connect to Surge using a Cardano dApp wallet, which acts as their admin wallet. With one signature, they generate 500 wallets — fully controlled and accessible only through their admin wallet.
2. In a single, seamless transaction from the admin wallet, they fund all generated wallets with a total of 100,000 ADA and their projects token. Surge randomizes the quantity of ADA distributed to each wallet, ranging from 100 ADA to 5,000 ADA.
3. Using Surge’s AI trade scheduler, project owners input their desired daily trading volume in terms of ADA. The more wallets and ADA involved, the greater the quality and quantity of activity that can be generated. In this example, 500 wallets funded with 100,000 ADA in total can support roughly 2,000,000 ADA in daily volume with high quality distribution.
4. Project owners then set a net buy/sell target to control the account’s net ADA position during execution. A target of 0 means total buys and sells will balance in ADA terms. A target of +1,000 ADA means token sells will exceed buys by 1,000 ADA. This net position is independent of total volume generated, allowing precise capital control.
5. With a single signature from the admin wallet, Surge begins executing the script across all 500 accounts, placing buy and sell orders on Minswap in varying amounts with no detectable patterns.

Within hours, the project shows strong on-chain activity without writing a line of code or surrendering custody. Volume and active accounts surge, and new users and visibility should follow. The broader ecosystem is positively impacted as Cardano’s KPIs improve.

This is just one project using Surge — imagine 10, 20, or 100s. The capital needed to 10x Cardano’s volume and active accounts should be small when compared to the potential upside. Scaling solutions like Leios are being explored, which can further reduce the cost of activity for the ecosystem.

Generating volume is not the end game. As Cardano metrics grow, so should real user inflows and attention.

4. Team

Surge is built by Cardano-native developers and DeFi users with deep experience across smart contracts, trading algorithms, and foundational Cardano technology. The team has made core contributions at IOHK and has advisors from some of Cardano’s leading projects. Together, we’re focused on improving Cardano’s ecosystem-wide metrics as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Jann Müller is our lead engineer and formerly led the development of Cardano’s smart contract and dApp runtime at IOHK. Prior to that, he worked as a compiler engineer on Plutus, where he helped implement core smart contracts, built development tools, and contributed to key ledger features like native assets and extended UTXO. His framework for offchain code in Haskell on Cardano, sc-tools, is revered. Jann’s work has extended to leading the development of the Djed stablecoin, contributing to DEXs, and more. With deep experience in low-level systems, blockchain architecture, and Plutus internals, Jann brings unmatched technical insight to Surge’s market-making engine.

We are committed to:

• Building a transparent, non-custodial platform
• Prioritizing security
• Supporting Cardano’s mission of decentralization and user sovereignty

5. Roadmap

The current roadmap is focused on execution. We want to deliver what Cardano needs most, now. Multiple leading Cardano projects have expressed interest in using Surge, and we will focus on delivering for those teams as quickly as possible.

Q3 2025

• Public Testnet
• External Audit
• V1 Mainnet
• Onboard key Cardano projects to start market making with Surge

Q3/Q4 2025

• V2 Mainnet — (new features: AI script generation, privacy improvements, condition based trades, server execution)

At Surge, we believe in maximum transparency, prompt delivery, and evolving to best serve the Cardano ecosystem.

6. Conclusion

Increasing on-chain activity is the single biggest lever for Cardano’s growth. Market making is not optional infrastructure. It is essential. Surge puts this tool in everyone’s hands.

Cardano has the strongest foundation in crypto. Now it’s time for the next phase of adoption.

Let’s make it a Surge.

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