Discontinued(?) arbitrage-tool project on GitHub

I have been researching arbitrage opportunities on crypto-exchanges and there have been some really good Steemit posts on the subject.

https://github.com/manu354/cryptocurrency-arbitrage

I found this interesting project on GitHub around a month ago. I just recently joined Steemit and I don’t know if this project has been covered by someone before me on Steemit so I decided to write a short summary of my experience with it. The project seems to be abandoned by the main developer (manu354) but the code is freely available to tinker with, so there could be a chance to make something useful out of it. There are many bugs with the code though and no one should try to use it for any economic decision making as it is.

Installation is easy and straightforward. Just follow the instructions on the website:

clone git repository
install node.js
install npm
navigate to project folder in terminal
npm install
npm start
open browser
localhost:3000

This is how it looks like.

You can select different coins and markets to search for arbitrage opportunities from panel at the left. Not all of them work though.

The system has some significant flaws:

The algorithm is comparing mean prices between exchanges. It doesn’t take into account the spread at all. Especially for assets with low trading volumes and big spreads the mean price isn’t good representative for the real sell or buy prices. This leads to lots of false positive opportunities.

Some coins have missing information from some exchanges which is treated as price of 0.

Some coins that have similar abbreviations on different exchanges can be mixed up by the algorithm.

Even though the system doesn’t work very well, for me as a complete novice it served as a good introduction to the world of cryptocurrency arbitrage and some basic economic concepts around it. It was also fun to try to improve the code by disabling faulty coins from the code. This was my first article on Steemit. I hope it was of interest to someone in the community.

• nightcap