Participants in our Advanced MEV course often ask if we provide a working arbitrage bot. We teach techniques, not an off-the-shelf bot, because handing out a “turnkey” script would set you up to lose money. Here’s why.
In the high-speed world of DeFi, the dream of “passive income” from a downloaded arbitrage bot is powerful. Fund it with ETH, hit play, and let it print money while you sleep. The reality: a public, generic bot is usually a fast track to losing your principal.
The “public knowledge” paradox: zero alpha
Trading alpha decays as it becomes common knowledge. If your bot is open-source or sold publicly, hundreds (or thousands) share the same logic.
- Crowded trades: Every clone fires on the same price gap (e.g., Uniswap vs. SushiSwap).
- Race to the bottom: With identical logic, the only lever is gas bidding—margins shrink to zero.
In crypto arbitrage, if the strategy is public, the profit is zero.
The MEV battlefield: minnows vs. sharks
The mempool is a “dark forest” watched by professional MEV searchers. Standard bots broadcast to the public mempool, inviting predators.
- Front-running: A searcher copies your tx and bids slightly higher to land before you.
- Sandwiching: A searcher buys before you, sells after you, and harvests the slippage you created.
Off-the-shelf bots rarely integrate with private relays (e.g., Flashbots) to avoid these attacks.
Smart contract risk and honeypots
Many “free arbitrage bots” on YouTube, Discord, or GitHub are booby-trapped.
- The trap: Code looks like it trades between DEXs.
- The exploit: Obfuscated logic siphons your capital to the scammer’s wallet.
Latency and infrastructure
Pros don’t run bots on a home laptop or a random cloud instance. They compete on hardware and routing.
- Colocation: Nodes sit close to validators to shave milliseconds.
- Optimised code: Rust/C++ pipelines outrun interpreted Python/JS scripts.
Summary: a reality check
Running a standard bot is like entering Formula 1 with a family saloon: higher latency, public logic, and no protection against MEV predators.
| Feature | Off-the-Shelf Bot | Professional Searcher |
|---|---|---|
| Strategy | Public / Generic | Custom / Proprietary |
| Mempool | Public (Vulnerable) | Private relays (Flashbots) |
| Speed | Standard | Nanosecond optimisation |
| Risk | High (Hacks/Competition) | Managed |
The takeaway
Profitable arbitrage demands proprietary code, private infrastructure, and deep protocol awareness. If the tool is easy to find, the profit is already gone. In our next article we’ll look at arbitrage across different chains and how architecture drives strategy.