Profit Maximization In Arbitrage Loops

Cyclic arbitrage chances exist abundantly among decentralized exchanges (DEXs), like Uniswap V2. For an arbitrage cycle (loop), researchers or practitioners usually choose a specific token, such as Ether (the cryptocurrency from Ethereum) as input, and optimize their input amount to get the net maximal amount of the specific token as arbitrage profit without considering the tokens’ market price from the centralized markets (CEXs). By considering the tokens’ prices from CEXs in this paper, the new arbitrage profit will be quantified as the product of the net number of a specific token we got from the arbitrage loop and its corresponding price in CEXs. The new arbitrage profit will be called monetized arbitrage profit in this paper. Based on this concept, we put forward three different strategies to maximize the monetized arbitrage profit for each arbitrage loop. The first strategy is called the MaxPrice strategy. Under this strategy, arbitrageurs start arbitrage only from the token with the highest CEX price. The second strategy is called the MaxMax strategy. Under this strategy, we calculate the monetized arbitrage profit for each token as input in turn in the arbitrage loop. Then, we pick up the most maximal monetized arbitrage profit among them as the monetized arbitrage profit of the MaxMax strategy. It is easy to prove that this strategy can bring more profit than the MaxPrice strategy. The third one is called the Convex Optimization strategy. In this strategy, we mapped the MaxMax strategy to a convex optimization problem and proved that the Convex Optimization strategy could get more profit in theory than the MaxMax strategy, which is proved again in a given example. We also proved that if no arbitrage profit exists according to the MaxMax strategy, then the Convex Optimization strategy can not detect any arbitrage profit, either. However, the empirical data analysis denotes that the profitability of the Convex Optimization strategy is almost equal to that of the MaxMax strategy, and the MaxPrice strategy is not reliable in getting the maximal monetized arbitrage profit compared to the MaxMax strategy.