The business model of market makers is to "borrow coins from the project party now, and then return them to the project party at a future point in time", so the money they can earn is the difference between selling at a high point and buying back at a low point. The initial chips do not need to be collected from the market by themselves; they are directly borrowed from the project party (for those who understand finance, this is actually standard short-selling terms). You might ask, why do project parties want to find them? Because market makers can provide liquidity and help the project party sell their tokens, so essentially market makers serve as service providers and are "value extractors" for the market.
Let me ask you a question: if you were a market maker, how would you play this game to ensure the highest profit? If it were me, I would try to set the opening price extremely high, ensuring that the selling point is the highest, and then try to push it down as much as possible to buy back the chips (so the opening price is not determined by the exchange, but rather by the project party and the market maker; next time, don't blame the wrong people. However, during this process, major exchanges can indeed help retail investors secure more rights, such as in the pre-market, or more extremely, reaching an agreement with the project party in advance that they cannot set the opening price higher than a certain amount, or else they won't be allowed back in. But there are very few exchanges with such absolute pricing power).
Therefore, the relationship between market makers and project parties is one of cooperation + game theory. Unless the project party is well-managed and has clearly stated that no one can push the price down, and everyone should work together to build the market; otherwise, the project party and market makers can easily turn into a "race to the exit" game. Market makers want to sell at a high point, and the project party, having spent so much money on listing and marketing, also wants to sell at a high point. If the market maker has a lot of chips, it can lead to both sides racing to exit, which would directly disrupt the market consensus. In this case, retail investors would get crushed. You can observe which new VC tokens have been heavily dumped; these are cases where neither the market makers nor the project parties have thought through the strategy, pushing out low-quality listings and directly starting a harvesting mode.
If you are a small retail investor and are unclear about the rules of this game, be kinder to yourself; buy some blue-chip tokens that have gone through at least one cycle and have consensus, and avoid gambling recklessly.
