Most markets work. Buyers find sellers, prices form, transactions happen. We barely notice.
But some markets don’t work — not because participants don’t want to trade, but because the market itself is too thin. Too few participants, too little trust, too much complexity for anyone to navigate alone.
What Makes a Market “Thin”?
Nobel laureate Alvin Roth identified the pattern: certain markets lack the critical mass of participants, information, and trust required for efficient exchange. These markets suffer from predictable friction points:
- Search friction — participants can’t find each other
- Information asymmetry — one side knows more than the other, and neither will reveal what they know first
- Trust deficit — no track record, no reputation signals, no way to verify claims
- Thickness failure — not enough participants to sustain regular activity
- Congestion — the few participants that exist can’t process the complexity fast enough
These aren’t random failures. They’re structural. And they affect real people — farmers who can’t find buyers for specialty crops, small exporters who can’t navigate new trade corridors, service providers in niche domains who can’t connect with the clients who need them.
Why Now?
Two forces are converging:
Geopolitical urgency. Canada and other middle powers are diversifying trade away from single-market dependency. Every new trade corridor — Canada-India, Canada-Indonesia, Canada-ASEAN — starts as a thin market. The participants exist. The desire to trade exists. But the market infrastructure doesn’t.
AI technical maturity. Large language models, vector search, and semantic matching have reached the point where they can handle the information density and nuance that thin markets demand. Two years ago, this engineering toolkit didn’t exist.
What We’re Building
DeeperPoint is building an open-source harness called Cosolvent that addresses thin market failures systematically:
- AI-mediated matching that finds “fit” without forcing mutual disclosure — solving the information asymmetry problem
- Trust gradation that builds confidence incrementally, from anonymous browsing to verified transactions
- Multilateral deal assembly that brings together not just buyers and sellers, but the facilitators (logistics, finance, compliance) that complex transactions require
The framework is designed to be deployed across different market verticals — the physics are the same whether you’re matching grain traders or connecting social service providers with clients.
Follow Along
This blog will document the journey — the science, the engineering decisions, the lessons learned. If you’re working in a market that’s too thin to function, you’re not alone. And for the first time, there’s a systematic approach to fixing it.