Since learning how to perform atomic arbitrage, I’ve been paying more attention to successful bots on Snowtrace, Etherscan and FTMscan.
My broad takeaway is that UniswapV2-style two-pool atomic arbitrage is highly competitive and extremely difficult to make profitable. It’s still a lot of fun and I learned a lot doing it, but I’m searching for more lucrative “long-tail” pastures.
Another arena that I suspect is better for the solo searcher is doing atomic arbitrage with non-native pairs. When I say “native pair”, I refer to the approach of churning WAVAX/WETH/WFTM through two or more liquidity pools and netting some amount of that same token. This is the style that almost everyone does — it’s low risk, easy to implement and optimize, and thus it’s a crowded trade. When I say “non-native pair”, I mean something like our old favorite: sSPELL-SPELL. While both halves of the pair might have an associated WAVAX/WETH/WFTM pool elsewhere, I concentrate my efforts on the pool with both non-native tokens (i.e. WAVAX/WETH/WFTM are not present).