RUNE ARB BOT COMPETITION WINNERS

2020-07-06 — 4 min read

15,000 RUNE awarded to community built open source arbitrage bots.

Background

In April the team announced a 17,500 RUNE bounty for the best open-source arbitrage bot on Binance Dex RUNE pairs.

The competition was designed to promote community development of open-source arbitrage platforms on RUNE markets and had an end date of 13 May 2020.

Arb Bot Capabilities:

Import wallet keys locally

Compare markets, log trade opportunities

Open and close orders to take trade opportunities

Log a running PNL

Judging Criteria:

Open-source
No compilation errors, clean, readable code.
Can import wallet and execute trades

Bonus Points:

Tests, Logging, PNL statement
LocalHost UI dashboard (simple)
Actually makes a profit

Submissions

The competition was extended through June to give participants sufficient time to meet the eligibility criteria and refine their bots. Two submissions were subsequently received from community members with prizes awarded based on the selection criteria above.

The team was generally impressed by the quality of submissions and pleased to see two competing frameworks used (go & python). Prizes have now been awarded for 1st & 2nd place with the 3rd place prize being retained for future competitions.

Owing to the recent RUNE price appreciation the total prize pool increased from $2,000 to almost $8,000! Congratulations to the winners!

First Prize — 10,000 RUNE — Zlyzol
https://gitlab.com/zlyzol/dexarbot

What motivated you to build the arbitrage bot?

to learn new things and to make profit

2. Explain the technology choices for your bot and why?

go language + binance go sdk, THORChain is in written in go so it was also my choice!

3. How does your bot work at a high level?

the bot compares RUNE/BUSD with BNB/BUSD and RUNE/BNB orderbooks (prices and amounts) using Binance WebSocket API and if there is an opportunity, the bot executes the orders

4. Is it easy to import a wallet & get started?

yes it is very simple and is explained in the readme

5. Is your bot profitable? What are your observations?

yes, the bot is profitable (about $600 in 3 weeks) but I expected more arbitrage opportunities.

6. What needs to be improved / what’s up next?

I’m working on a brand new version, it will be also able to arbitrage THORChain pools.

Second Prize — 5,000 RUNE — hoodieonwho
https://gitlab.com/zheye/thunder/

What motivated you to build the arbitrage bot?

Personal interest in creating a bot + school project + thorchain fan!

2. Explain the technology choices for your bot and why?

I used python and django. I combined the python-sdk provided by binance with my own python api client auto-generated by swagger.

I believe python suits the task of building arbitrage bot in term of managing the codebase and future code extension.

3. How does your bot work at a high level?

User chooses a coin as base currency, call it theta. The bot find coins alpha and beta, and conduct following trade if theta_new — theta_old > 0.
[theta_old→alpha→beta→theta_new]

Additionally, user can customize the bot using parameter such as omega (ratio between order_size and liquidity in order_book).

4. Is it easy to import a wallet & get started?

Currently, user needs to pass in their private key as argument when running the python application.

5. Is your bot profitable? What are your observations?

My bot is still in the phase of testing, and I had successful trades. However, it is still far from being able to generate consistent profit.

Observation: there aren’t many arbitrage bot running on binance dex currently, I expect the competition between bots to increase when more players enter the market.

6. What needs to be improved / what’s up next?

Currently in the process of adding below features:
- A better dashboard to manage the bot and user’s wallet.
- A parser that reads all market pair and let user choose any triangular pair to execute trades on.
- Add auto-optimization for API request rate
- Make docker container

Final Notes:

The arb bot competition gave a chance for the community to learn and build a simple bot that can find and take action on arbitrage opportunities. This will enable more users to become sophisticated market participants and will enable ASGARDEX to be supported by more entities who can maintain liquidity. Many thanks to Zlyzol and Hoodie for their submissions!

The community is encouraged to get involved and contribute to building the future of liquidity around THORChain. Technically minded individuals and teams are encouraged to submit proposals for products demonstrating high value add to the network.

Join @thorchain_dev on telegram to get the conversation started.