▸Arbitrage Guide

Crypto Arbitrage Bot

By JaredETH Research · MEV Research & Engineering · Updated 2026-05-17

A crypto arbitrage bot profits from price differences between exchanges. The same token trades at slightly different prices on Uniswap, Sushiswap, Curve, Balancer, Binance, and dozens of other venues — an arbitrage bot detects those gaps in real time, buys on the cheap venue, sells on the expensive one, and pockets the spread. On Ethereum, the most advanced arbitrage bots execute the entire round-trip atomically inside a single block using flash loans for zero-capital arbitrage. DEX-to-DEX arbitrage alone generates an estimated $100–200 million per year in net profit across the top 10 Ethereum operators, with cross-DEX, CEX-DEX, and triangular routes each representing distinct strategy categories. The largest atomic arbitrage operator on Ethereum (contract 0xa69b…E5C8) has extracted approximately 3,200 ETH since 2023.

Arbitrage bots are one of the three foundational MEV bot strategies alongside sandwich attacks and JIT liquidity. Unlike sandwich attacks, arbitrage doesn't harm any specific user — it just keeps prices aligned across venues. This page covers DEX-to-DEX arbitrage, CEX-DEX arbitrage, triangular arbitrage, flash-loan arbitrage, and how to evaluate an arbitrage bot for your use case.

On this page

What is a crypto arbitrage bot?
DEX-to-DEX arbitrage
CEX-DEX arbitrage
Triangular arbitrage
Flash-loan arbitrage
Best crypto arbitrage bots compared
Free vs paid arbitrage bots
Open-source arbitrage bots — do they work?

What is a crypto arbitrage bot?

A crypto arbitrage bot is automated software that monitors prices across multiple exchanges and executes trades whenever the same asset trades at different prices on different venues. On Ethereum, the bot operates entirely on-chain: it reads liquidity pool states from Uniswap, Curve, Balancer, and other AMMs in real time, calculates arbitrage opportunities continuously, and submits transactions to capture them.

Successful arbitrage bots need three things: comprehensive market coverage (so no opportunity is missed), low-latency execution (so they win the opportunity against competitors), and gas-optimized smart contracts (so even small spreads are profitable). Production-grade Ethereum arbitrage bots run dedicated nodes, co-located near major builders, with custom Solidity contracts that compress an entire arbitrage path into one transaction.

DEX-to-DEX arbitrage

The simplest form. The same trading pair — say WETH/USDC — exists on multiple DEXs: Uniswap V2, Uniswap V3 with 0.05/0.3/1% fee tiers, Sushiswap, Curve's tricrypto pool, Balancer's weighted pools, PancakeSwap V3 on Ethereum, and a few others. Liquidity is fragmented, and prices diverge whenever a large trade hits one pool.

Multi-hop arbitrage — bot evaluates every path and submits only the most profitable

A DEX arbitrage bot reads all pool states each block, calculates the optimal path using algorithms like Bellman-Ford or SPFA (Shortest Path Faster Algorithm), and submits an atomic transaction: buy WETH on Uniswap V3 0.05%, sell WETH on Sushiswap, profit the spread. The entire path executes in one transaction — if any leg fails, all of them revert.

For a deeper breakdown of cross-DEX strategies, see the DEX arbitrage guide.

CEX-DEX arbitrage

CEX-DEX arbitrage spans centralized exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, OKX, Bybit) and decentralized exchanges (Uniswap, Curve). When Binance's WETH/USDT price diverges from Uniswap's WETH/USDC by enough to cover gas + slippage + the withdrawal/deposit delta, an opportunity exists.

CEX-DEX arbitrage is harder than pure DEX arbitrage because the two legs aren't atomic — there's settlement risk between the on-chain swap and the off-chain trade. Most CEX-DEX arbitrage operators hedge by holding inventory on both sides (instead of round-tripping each trade), which turns it into a market-making strategy rather than pure atomic arb. This is the model Wintermute and similar institutional desks run at scale.

Triangular arbitrage

Triangular arbitrage uses three legs in a closed loop. Start with USDC, swap to WETH, swap to WBTC, swap back to USDC — if the three prices are misaligned, you end with more USDC than you started.

On a single CEX, triangular arbitrage is well-understood and competitive — every major trading firm runs it. On DEX, triangular arbitrage is harder because the three legs each pay gas + DEX fees + slippage. The profitable opportunities tend to be short-lived, opening when a large trade pushes one of the three pools out of equilibrium. See the triangular arbitrage guide for routing algorithms and live examples.

Flash-loan arbitrage

Flash-loan arbitrage is the headline strategy of DeFi MEV. A flash-loan arbitrage bot borrows a large amount of capital from Aave, Balancer, or Uniswap V3 within a single transaction, uses that capital to execute the arbitrage path, and repays the loan in the same transaction. If repayment fails (because the arbitrage didn't actually profit), the entire transaction reverts and no harm is done.

The brilliance of flash loans: an arbitrage bot can capture spreads that would normally require millions of dollars in working capital, without holding any capital itself. The only cost is gas + the flash-loan fee (typically 0.05–0.09%, or 0 on Balancer). Most large arbitrage operators on Ethereum use Balancer flash loans because they're fee-free.

Best crypto arbitrage bots compared

Bot	Type	Pricing	Best for
JaredETH	DEX arb + sandwich + JIT	3k/yr or 10k USDT	Ethereum MEV operators
Hummingbot	CEX-CEX + triangular	Free / open source	CEX market making
Pionex	CEX spot-futures arb	Free (with fees)	Retail users on Pionex
Cryptohopper	CEX-CEX	$19–$99/mo	Beginner retail traders
Bitsgap	Grid + arb on CEXs	$29–$149/mo	Multi-exchange grid bots

The comparison categories vary significantly. Hummingbot, Pionex, Cryptohopper, and Bitsgap are retail CEX-focused tools that work on Binance/Coinbase/OKX accounts and don't require any on-chain infrastructure. The JaredETH MEV bot is a different product category — it's a production Ethereum MEV bot that requires running validators or trusting managed infrastructure, but generates substantially higher returns when it works.

Free vs paid arbitrage bots

Free crypto arbitrage bots exist — Hummingbot is the most credible open-source option. They work well for CEX market making and basic triangular arbitrage on a single exchange. They don't work for Ethereum DEX arbitrage at any scale because the competitive bots have proprietary path-finding, latency advantages, and direct builder relationships that a generic open-source tool can't replicate.

Paid arbitrage bots fall into two tiers: retail SaaS ($20–$150/mo) targeting CEX users and institutional tools ($10k+/yr) targeting on-chain MEV operators. The retail tier generates modest returns because the strategy is commoditized; the institutional tier generates substantially higher returns but requires real infrastructure and capital.

Open-source arbitrage bots — do they work?

Search GitHub for "arbitrage bot" and you'll find hundreds of repositories. Most are educational. None of them produce sustained Ethereum DEX arbitrage profit. Reasons:

Latency: public RPCs deliver pool updates 50–200ms after dedicated nodes do.
Builder access: top builders throttle untrusted senders; established operators have direct lines.
Path-finding: open-source path optimizers use exhaustive search; production bots use proprietary algorithms tuned to specific pool topologies.
Gas optimization: open-source contracts cost 2–3x more gas per transaction than hand-optimized production code.

Open-source repos remain valuable for learning the mechanics. They're not valuable as production deployments. See build vs buy a MEV bot for the full economics breakdown.