Crypto Circle Veteran Six: No Trading, Only Arbitrage

Author: Ada, TechFlow

This year’s crypto marketplace hasn’t been lively.

Altcoin performance has been bleak overall, and aside from a handful of on-chain trading experts, few people are consistently making profit.

But in this seemingly quiet marketplace, there’s still a group quietly getting rich.

They’re almost “outsiders”:

No faith in cryptocurrency, don’t care about fundamentals or narratives, and don’t trade on emotion.

Their principle is simple: Arbitrage only, no trading.

Recently, “Doll Sister’s” article went viral. In a way, she’s also an arbitrageur, surviving on algorithms, emotion, and traffic differentials.

She and the arbitrageurs in Moments are essentially doing the same thing: finding opportunities in the gaps of the rules and using execution to amplify profit.

In this world where speculation and innovation coexist, arbitrageurs are often more clear-headed than builders.

They see system loopholes, misaligned incentives, rule delays, and human greed.

In this issue, we interviewed several different types of arbitrageurs.

Their stories might show us: making money in Moments can also be steady.

Arbitrageur Lao Liu: Arbitrage isn’t a strategy, it’s a mindset

I’m Lao Liu, entered Moments in 2021.

Like many, it was around mid-2021 during the peak of DOGE and SHIB. A friend in the building materials business made money just blindly buying in, then strongly recommended it to me: “Come on, you can make 10k a day here.”

You can guess the result: in that DOGE miracle, he made money, I lost, became the bag holder. But that was the first time I truly felt that in Moments, marketplace emotion can quickly and directly turn into wealth.

Then after the last chain game frenzy at year-end, a four-year Bear Market arrived. It was this Bear Market that gave me time to notice things like price differences between exchanges, and Exchange Rate differences between BTC/ETH.

At that time, I hadn’t thought about making money from it, just felt there were too many misalignments in this marketplace, so the latency between information and price was money. Later, I realized that information differentials in web3 can be precisely exploited. Step by step, I went from observer to arbitrageur.

My major and day job are somewhat related to finance, but I’m not from a trading background.

Many people hear “arbitrage” and think you need tech, advanced scripts, and only financial experts can play. Actually, when I started, my arbitrage was very primitive—manual “brick moving.” No scripts, no bots, just eyes, hands, and internet speed.

Later, I started learning tools and scripts with a partner. Even when we added a bit of quant, the core was still grassroots trial and error.

So I think my grassroots background gave me a third-person perspective on Moments. I don’t worship new finance, nor reject tech. I don’t fully rely on trading, but lean toward arbitrage logic—where it’s simple and low-barrier, I go. Learn by doing, get better by learning, that’s always been my process.

On the other hand, if I had a quant or forex background, I might have started with Wall Street’s options hedging, missing out on a lot of wild fun.

My first successful arbitrage was at the end of 2021, when BTC and ETH often had price differences on Binance and OKX, so I considered manual “brick moving.”

I bought ETH at 3600 on Binance, OKX’s offer was around 3630, theoretical profit was $30/ETH. But during arbitrage, on-chain congestion is common, and most price difference opportunities last only a few minutes or even seconds. By the time I finished the whole brick-moving operation and Settlement, after deducting transfer fees, Trading Fee, and time Fluctuation, my actual net profit was far below the surface price difference.

Though I didn’t make much, I felt the joy of arbitrage for the first time.

Facing the flood of new projects, I mainly look at two things: first, fundamentals—basic TVL and on-chain activity, plus team background, protocol income, and community heat. Second, arbitrage space—assessing if there’s a low-efficiency marketplace opportunity, like uneven Liquidity or a loophole in the airdrop mechanism.

Also, if a project hasn’t formed a price closed loop, I won’t touch it. For example, I ask myself three questions: Does this project have verifiable cash flow or Return logic? Is there obvious asymmetry in its mechanism? Are incentives excessive? If all answers are “yes,” there’s likely arbitrage space.

Overall, I prefer Decentralized Finance and cross-chain projects, since they offer more arbitrage opportunities.

Honestly, arbitrage is pretty tough. On the surface, it looks like you’re always “milking,” but really you’re milking your own nerves.

You have to deal with latency, Fluctuation, and loneliness. People without routine get swallowed by anxiety quickly.

Also, you have to learn to shut down—after a win or a Loss, don’t keep grinding.

Shut the computer when needed, go out for a good meal, play games. When your body and mind are clear, you spot opportunities more accurately.

Recently, I bought a new fish tank and started raising guppies. It’s very healing after work. The trick to raising fish is to get the water right first, then you don’t need to intervene daily—it grows on its own. That’s a lot like our ultimate goal in arbitrage.

Over the years, I’ve become more convinced: the whole Moments is actually arbitrage.

Point farming, airdrop hunting, subsidy milking, rule exploiting, buying low and selling high—all are about exploiting some kind of system asymmetry.

Milking is a low-dimensional form of arbitrage, quant is high-dimensional, but the soul is the same: find inefficiency, amplify with execution.

So I often say, arbitrage isn’t a set of strategies, it’s a mindset. It’s not just about finding price differences, but upgrading your way of thinking.

It keeps you in a cycle of observation–verification–execution. When you maintain this awareness, you’re not just someone who makes money from price differences, but someone who can keep making money from them.

Once you have the arbitrage mindset, you’ll find: Moments isn’t a casino, it’s more like a mirror, reflecting everyone’s understanding of efficiency, desire, and execution.

Qingshui: Be a friend of time

I’m Qingshui, have been arbitraging for over three years, mainly focusing on primary marketplace launches.

I first heard about blockchain in 2020, when I was still doing cross-border e-commerce, but business was getting worse and I urgently needed a new outlet.

Later, I met some Moments people in a paid Group and started learning from them. I really wanted to succeed, so from 2022 to April 2023, I bought a lot of Courses and joined many paid Groups, hoping to find money-making opportunities.

Later, I got lucky. In May 2023, inscriptions started appearing in the marketplace. I took 10,000 yuan from my credit card and started playing inscriptions. It was really easy to make money then—from May 2023 to the end of the year, my highest floating profit was over ten million, but since it was my first time with something new, I lacked discipline and didn’t take profit in time, so the profit retraced. But I got a taste of success, paid off my Liabilities, and had some left over, which I used to buy Bitcoin.

Since then, I’ve made primary marketplace arbitrage my main job. Every day, except for eating and sleeping, I’m online watching for the latest project info. Later, I built my own paid Group “Spark of Stars,” which peaked at over a thousand members. I update the latest project info for the Group daily and write operation guides, hoping to lead a group to get good returns through risk-free arbitrage in Moments.

If I were to give newcomers some advice on primary marketplace arbitrage, it’s to lock in profit in time—don’t get greedy. From my experience, I had a very regrettable incident. I participated in a project called PIPE, with a cost of only 0.8u, but it was super hot and peaked at 8000u per ticket, a ten-thousand-fold profit. I wanted to turn my life around with this, so I held and didn’t sell, but then it started to fall. Maybe it was stubbornness, thinking the price would pump again and break new highs, so I held on. But in the end, the coin went to zero. This was a deep lesson for me, and I often use it to warn myself and newcomers: don’t be greedy, earn steadily, and get rich slowly.

This year, there haven’t been any super hot primary marketplace projects, so my Group has become more comprehensive—I Share any money-making projects with members. For example, Binance’s Alpha, Spark protocol, etc. After being in this marketplace for a while, you see that the main thing affecting profit is mindset. Many people go from ignoring primary marketplace arbitrage, to chasing it, to fear of missing out (FOMO), and finally getting stuck holding the bag. This is classic retail psychology—everyone dreams of overnight wealth, but reality slaps them. Ultimately, it’s about not being able to reconcile with yourself, going further down the wrong path.

Leizi: Locking in profit with technology

I’m Leizi, have been arbitraging for four years, currently focusing on High Frequency arbitrage between multiple DEXs in the Solana ecosystem.

My entry into crypto was somewhat accidental.

In early 2021, during the Decentralized Finance boom, I was still in traditional medical sales. A friend mentioned the Decentralized Finance craze, so I joined the community and tried trading alts and MEME coins. In that process, I truly felt the unique logic of this industry—“profit quickly by reaction speed and information differential”—and realized there were opportunities here unlike traditional industries.

The real turning point from “participant” to “deep diver” was in 2024, when I got into DEX arbitrage on Solana. At that time, MEME coin trading on Solana was exploding, volume rising fast, but few developers were focused on building arbitrage bots. I seized the chance, teamed up with some like-minded friends, started with a first-gen arbitrage product based on the Jupiter protocol, then iterated to a second-gen product supporting on-chain computation, and now a third-gen product with off-chain precision, manual route optimization, and core algorithm upgrades—step by step, upgrading arbitrage strategies to “refined efficiency optimization.”

When I first got into Moments, I played MEME coins and chased hot coins with the community, but soon realized that “making money from price Fluctuation” was too unstable: sometimes you make money by luck, next Fluctuation you lose it, and if a project runs off, you lose your Principal. Especially after the 2022 pullback, I knew I didn’t want “one-off windfalls,” but a path for steady capital growth—preserving Principal and accumulating Return is the only way to last in this industry.

Now, my core logic for project Filter is still around “arbitrage demand.” We mainly rely on our own scripts to Real Time monitor token volume on Solana. The script focuses on tokens with “sudden higher trade volumes”—for example, a token’s daily volume jumps from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, or Liquidity rises on multiple DEXs at once. These situations often create price difference Fluctuation, and thus arbitrage space. We add these tokens to a watchlist, then further calculate price differences and Slippage costs across platforms to judge if it’s worth plugging into our arbitrage strategy.

The past few years in the arbitrage track can be summed up as “rising barriers, increasingly refined competition.”

Early on in Solana, even simple Python scripts and regular servers could catch cross-DEX price differences for decent Return; but now it’s totally different. Technically, everyone’s moved from “basic price difference capture” to “off-chain precision + dynamic route optimization.” Hardware is maxed out—some rent physical servers closest to Solana Nodes, custom-optimize network bandwidth, all to shave a few more milliseconds off trade latency; on the personnel side, more teams with traditional quant and fintech backgrounds are entering, bringing mature risk models and tech frameworks, raising the competitive bar.

Looking back, my biggest regret isn’t a specific Loss, but that in the early arbitrage days, I missed several waves of industry opportunity because I couldn’t crack core tech in time. That feeling of “knowing the opportunity is there, but lacking the tech to seize it and watching others make money” is more frustrating than losing money.

Later, I realized that in the Web3 arbitrage track, especially in fast-iterating ecosystems like Solana, “tech is the core competitive edge.” Without solid tech, you can spot opportunities but not capture them. Because of these regrets, I now focus heavily on “continuous tech improvement.” I set aside time daily to study advanced Rust, research on-chain trade logic, and learn strategy optimization from industry tech leaders—even if progress is slow, I don’t want to miss the next marketplace opportunity because “tech isn’t up to par.” Ultimately, these regrets made me clear-headed: crypto arbitrage is never about “luck,” but “tech-driven opportunity.” Only by cracking core tech early and constantly improving can you stand firm in the industry and not leave new regrets due to “insufficient ability.”

Qingshan: The arbitrage track is getting crowded

I’m Qingshan, have been in Moments for three years.

I first got involved at the end of 2022, through the Odaily “Making Money with Skills” event, where the learning materials’ analysis and description of crypto made me eager to join—I felt there were opportunities everywhere.

I met many people at that event, and by joining various activities spun off by Moments veterans, I gradually got involved and integrated into the industry.

In my three years in Moments, I’ve tried secondary marketplace Cryptocurrency Trading, simple Bitcoin DCA, meme coin hunting, and milking. Later, I found that asymmetric Return suited my pace better.

I don’t have a finance or trading background. Before going full-time in crypto, I worked in traditional software development for five years, which made me more rigorous in evaluating projects. After all, every program is written by people, and I never fully trust code.

Every year, there are new money-making hotspots, and I keep learning and iterating with the marketplace.

2023 was my most profitable year—inscriptions were hot, and some great projects emerged. But I mainly operated single accounts, never thought to leverage manpower.

In 2024, I participated in Bitget’s Earn projects in bulk, mainly the FUEL launchx event—single account, $5,000, two-day deposit, Yield 2%. Not high at first glance, but annualized it’s pretty good.

This year, I’m mainly involved in large-scale Earn events and Binance’s Alpha points activities. Alpha started early this year and has been my most stable cash flow project—single Alpha project Return is six figures.

This year, all the wealth effect is on Binance. Focus on Binance’s events and new projects, and you won’t go wrong. Looking for projects in Binance’s partner events and the “Binance alpha” list yields good opportunities. For example, a few days ago, Binance Wallet’s “zerobasezk” Earn event had an annualized Yield of about 16%.

But I think the arbitrage track is getting crowded, good opportunities are fewer, and time windows are shorter. Long-term prospects aren’t great—every new track’s wealth window follows this pattern: a few make money, most are skeptical, then most make money, more join, difficulty rises, then (external profit-seeking) knowledge payment and training industries boom, and finally it returns to the mean.

If this track disappears in the future, I’ll switch battlefields. Wherever there’s money to be made, I’ll go—like Hong Kong IPOs.

My earliest side hustle was convertible bond IPOs in the A-share marketplace. Before the new rules, it was almost risk-free.

In short, there will always be easy money somewhere, whether it’s Moments or convertible bonds—they’re just vehicles.

From an industry trend perspective, Moments is a marketplace with constant capital inflow. Early this year, US President Trump issued his own coin, and Bitcoin ETF/Ether ETF were established—these all signal that crypto is moving from niche to mainstream. I believe, with time, it’ll become a widely known industry.

Advice for peers or newcomers:

Black swans will happen. Do Risk Control—Risk Control is paramount, never all in.

There are many opportunities, but little Principal. Cherish every bit of Principal and maximize its value.

Keep a calm mind, treat making money as a skill, hone your skills, and making money is just a matter of time.