Arbitrator, A Bitcoin/Altcoin Arbitrage Trading Bot

The bot checks for altcoins, which are traded on both Poloniex and Bittrex and compares their prices. If the difference is big enough to earn at least some satoshis (after deducting transfer fees), it enters the trade. The bot records its activities and exchange rates in a database and uses this information to reinvest a portion of its profits into the most profitable (in terms of arbitragable) altcoin. Additionally, the amount of held altcoins is calculated based on their exchange rate, transfer fees and times. This allows the bot to profit from hyped (PnD) coins.

The original version of this bot had a backdoor which was removed from this fork and the fork has gone through a security audit and to the extent of the knowledge of the current maintainer is free of any other security issues. Furthermore, it currently has a few extra security features that prevent the web UI to be used in passwordless non-HTTPS Internet environments by default, which mitigates the original vulnerability that existed in the code. The code base is kept small and simple for the purpose of making it possible for people to perform their own security audit should they choose so. If you find any other bugs please file issues so that they can be fixed quickly!

You can see the bot running on a cheap linode here. Currently the bot is yielding daily profits of 7-20% on a seed investment of around 0.4BTC.

Supported Exchanges

• Bittrex (all BTC markets)
• Bleutrade (all BTC markets)
• Poloniex (all BTC markets)

Installation on Debian 9.0+ / Ubuntu 16.04+

Install required packages:

sudo apt-get install git php-cli php-curl php-mysqlnd mysql-server nginx-full php-fpm unzip apache2-utils ntpdate
sudo ntpdate ntp.ubuntu.com

Clone the repository on the server. Note that installation from ZIP archives isn't supported any more.

cd /var/www
git clone --recursive https://github.com/cryptoeax/arbbot.git

cd into the directory:

cd arbbot

Prepare the MySQL database:

  mysql -u root -p
  mysql> CREATE DATABASE arbitrage;
  mysql> GRANT ALL ON arbitrage.* TO arbitrage@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'YOUR_PASSWORD';
  mysql> use arbitrage;
  mysql> source database.sql;
  mysql> quit

Configure the database connection:

cp web/config.inc.php.example web/config.inc.php
nano web/config.inc.php

Configure the bot:

cp config.ini.example config.ini
nano config.ini

Edit all options to fit your needs and enter your API keys! You can change settings even while the bot is running. The changes will be automatically applied.

Configuring the Webinterface

First, you need to configure a username and password:

htpasswd -b /var/www/conf/arbitrage.passwd username password

Then you need to edit the web server configuration.

rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

The NGINX configuration file should look like this:

server {

        listen 80;
        root /var/www/arbbot/web;
        index index.html;
        server_name localhost;

        location / {

                auth_basic           "Restricted area";
                auth_basic_user_file /var/www/conf/arbitrage.passwd;

        }

        location ~ \.php$ {

          include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
          fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;

        }

}

If your web server is exposed to the public Internet, the UI will by default refuse to load unless you enable HTTPS. You can get a free certificate using Let's Encrypt, see this tutorial on how to do that. Assuming you have a certificate, you would need to add a ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key directive to the configration file, if the Let's Encrypt client doesn't do that for you (which it should.) If you are going to access your bot on http://localhost then you don't need to perform this step.

Now, restart the webserver:

/etc/init.d/nginx restart

You should now be able to access the webinterface with your browser.

Running the bot

Now you are ready to give the bot a test by running it:

php main.php

(Note: It is recommended to run main.php with hhvm instead of php in order to speed up the bot a bit.)

You should see output like this:

19:13:34: ARBITRATOR V2.0 launching

To actually allow the bot to buy coins automatically, you need to reserve some autobuy funds. You can do that either by running the following commands against the database manually:

  mysql -u root -p
  mysql> use arbitrage;
  mysql> UPDATE stats SET value = "0.2" WHERE keyy = "autobuy_funds";
  mysql> quit

This example assigns 0.2 BTC to the "autobuy_funds". The higher the amount, the more coins can be bought and the more arbitrage-opportunities can be taken. Be careful to keep at least 0.1 - 0.2 BTC at the exchange to give the bot enough room to trade.

Alternatively by enabling the general.admin-ui setting, the web UI shows you the Admin interface which allows you to change the autobuy funds amount. It is not recommended to enable this if your web UI isn't secure using password authentication and HTTPS in case it's exposed to the Internet.

How does the bot make profit?

Arbitrage trading means that differences in exchange rates between two exchanges are used to gain a profit. These opportunities usually exist only for a few seconds. It is important to act fast when such an opportunity is detected.

If you would buy the altcoin as soon as a price difference is detected and send it to the other exchange to sell it, you would most likely make a loss with this trade. Transfering coins usually takes 15 to 60 minutes. Enough time for the exchange rates to equalize.

To make a profit from price differences you must deposit the altcoin at the exchange with the higher sell rates (BID) and some BTC at the exchange with the higher buy rates (ASK).

Lets take BTCD as an example:

At Bittrex the current sell rate (BID) is 0.00395000 BTC At Poloniex the current buy rate (ASK) is 0.00382098 BTC

This means a Spread of 0.00012902 BTC

The bot sells BTCD at Bittrex for 0.00395000 BTC each and instantly buys the same amount at Poloniex for 0.00382098 BTC each. After the trade there is no change in the amount of BTCD. However, there is a profit of 0.00012902 BTC per traded BTCD.

The BTCD are now being transfered from Poloniex to Bittrex and can then be used for trading.

It wouldn't be very easy to buy all those altcoins for the bot. Additionally, some of them have such low volumes that there is rarely a trading opportunity. But you can delegate this job to the bot!

The bot will monitor the orderbooks of both exchanges and will decide which coins are worth to trade with. You will notice some messages like TRADE IS NOT PROFITABLE WITH AVAILABLE FUNDS in the log. This means that the bot has noted in its database that this coin can be traded with. During the next buying cycle, it will consider buying this coin.

Supporting Future Development

If you are running this bot and are making profits from it, please consider contributing towards future development of the project, either by contributing code or donating cryptocurrencies. PR/BTC/ETH contributions are welcome:

• BTC address: 3PUsQxePwa5ck93DaSBy5i9YmGU9kKa9YG
• ETH address: 0x2e732524459601546a93ee0307e1533bE69762d9

Funding this project would allow me to spend time on things like adding support for new exchanges.

Release History

• 2.0
  • Improved the web-based UI, charts, tooltips to help new users, legends
  • Added support for Bleutrade.
  • Added a P&L section in the UI to display detailed information about the incurred profits and losses as a result of trades, including daily and per-coin charts with filtering options.
  • Added precise accounting of unrealized profits/losses, taking all trade and transfer fees into account as reported by the exchanges.
  • Added accounting of realized (withdrawn) profits.
  • Added an Alerts section in the UI to display the stuck withdrawal and daily withdrawal limit alerts in the UI.
  • Add a "Hide zero balances" checkbox to the Wallets section
  • Added an admin UI for controlling the bot's settings from the web UI.
  • Optimized the bot to enable it to make up to 4 times more trades.
  • Optimized the accuracy of the bot to enable it to run at a profitable trade percentage of above 90%.
  • Several bug fixes and improvements to the stability of the bot.
• 1.0
  • Complete rewrite
  • Support for multiple exchanges, more automation and more configuration options
  • Initial public release
• 0.6
  • fixed possible incorrect calculation of order rates
• 0.5
  • removed default API key for mandrill and added configuration option
  • using sendmail if mail address is set but mandrill is disabled
  • added a description on how the bot works to the readme
  • made stray orders cancellation optional
• 0.4
  • added cancellation of stray orders
  • fixed a critical bug which caused the bot to sometimes load the wrong stats for a coin
• 0.3
  • increased timeouts for public API calls
  • added new config option 'min-profit'
  • added new config option 'altcoin-balance-factor'
  • improved some error messages to prevent confusion
  • using default settings when some config options are missing
  • some fixes to treat USDE and USDe as the same coin
  • corrected trading fees for Bittrex
  • decreased required use-amount before considering a coin for buying
  • changed timezone setting to UTC
  • some changes for compatibility with older PHP versions
• 0.2
  • moved exchange fees to new file 'fees.json'
  • added Mandrill to simplify sending of emails
  • bugfix to prevent endless loop if 'stats' table is empty
  • tweaked timeouts and exchange query rates
  • added comments to improve code readability
  • removed unused code
• 0.1
  • Initial limited public release