As seen above, Coygo Terminal provides a real-time view of spreads across six different trade pairs and multiple exchanges. Every time an ask or bid is updated spreads are re-calculated, with the largest and most profitable spreads shown first in green while negative spreads that would incur a loss are shown in red.

Speed is a prerequisite for success

Whatever tool you use, speed is the most important factor to capitalizing on arbitrage opportunities. Profitable spreads won’t appear for long as many other trades, as well as automated trading bots, will be looking to make a profit as soon as the spread appears. As others submit trades to try and make a profit this will drive the prices on both exchanges to converge together and close the spread, so your goal is to find the spread and act on it first.

How to profit from crypto arbitrage opportunities

In order to profit from arbitrage trading you need to be able to monitor prices on multiple exchanges in real-time, quickly find the biggest spreads, and submit orders.

There are a number of different strategies that can be used to act on an arbitrage opportunity. I will be discussing two popular approaches but there are certainly other options as well, triangular arbitrage in particular being another popular method.

Strategy 1: Buy, transfer, and sell

If you’ve decided that you’re seeing decent spreads on the BAT-ETH market between buying BAT on Kraken and selling it for ETH on Bittrex as in the example noted above, and you want to try to profit off of these spreads, you could simply purchase BAT on Kraken. With that done you can transfer it to your BAT wallet on Bittrex, then sell it for ETH. This can be successful but it’s a risky approach as profitable spreads sometimes only exist for a very short period of time, often under a second. Transferring cryptocurrencies between wallets takes time for the network to complete the necessary number of confirmations. By the time the deposit arrives on the second exchange, the price may no longer be higher than what you bought it for on the first exchange. Using cryptocurrencies with faster transfer times such as NANO or XLM can help mediate this issue, but it’s still not foolproof.

Coygo Terminal provides a Rapid Transfer interface to help facilitate this process, allowing you to quickly configure and submit transfers between wallets at different exchanges. Terminal will automatically fetch the deposit address for you so you don’t need to deal with manually copy/pasting wallet addresses, and the USD estimated value of the crypto to be sent will be displayed since it’s often easier to think of things in terms of USD. Below you will also see a list of pending and completed deposits and withdrawals so you can easily track the progress of the transfer.