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Crypto Arbitrage

Exploring the so-called ‘3-way arbitrage'trading strategy on Binance crypto currencies. Is this hype or could it be profitable?

What a concept! Make 3 trades in rapid succession when you find favorable exchange rates and voila! Profits in seconds and no experience of volatility.

How does this work?

Let's break this down using a ridiculously simple bartering scenario. When we exchange one crypto-currency for another we're bartering or exchanging fungible assets.

Let's image these scenario:

  • Jane has 10 almonds
  • Will has pineapples and will trade each for 5 almonds
  • Christine has mangoes and will trade evenly for a pineapple
  • Xavier has almonds and will trade 6 for every single mango

So in this arbitrage opportunity, Jane trades 10 almonds for 2 pineapples, and these for 2 mangoes which in turn she trades for 12 almonds.

She has profited 2 almonds through these trades because of anomalies in the exchanges.

Above is the identical type of 3-way arbitrage with crypto arbitrage currencies.

What in the beginning appears to be simple often is often not.

A few essential items to see in the real-world of crypto markets: https://ggmoneyonline.com/academy-of-arbitrage/

  • price discrepancies between markets are anomalies, they must be sniffed out deliberately
  • once an arbitrage opportunity is situated it must be executed quickly or you will be left by having an incomplete execution (1 or 2 trades in place of 3)
  • the trades must certanly be done as a Limit-Order at the precise price identified in the arbitrage exploration (we'll try this out in a bit)
  • transaction fees will start to erode the profitability of those trades (we'll examine this directly inside our code)

There's another key thing to understand about arbitrage trades but we'll enter into that when we've covered more details…

Broken triangles?

The data above proves a trace, because another line did not show the identical arbitrage on the market in 17:00:30 therefore it was gone.Had we initiated a trade for BTC it may have executed but then a trade for AR mightn't have. We can't make sure with only these records.

It's possible any particular one second later the USDT / BTC exchange was no longer offered at the limit price: BTC / USDT: 0.00002973 however now that individuals have the BTC perhaps the remainder 2 trades remain possible. We simply cannot know this when we initiate the arbitrage exchange.

Each Binance REST API call takes at the very least 200ms, in accordance with where we're located (where your code is running). Binance servers are available in Japan. A control order (a ‘Taker') isn't instantaneous, it might take another 500ms+ to return so our total time for 3 limit orders could realistically extend out to ~2secs. Obviously there may be some inability to execute a control order as specified for the reason that instant so you'll find so many ways an arbitrage execution may neglect to complete.

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