Triangular Arbitrage in Crypto: How It Works and Why It Matters

When you trade crypto, you might hear about triangular arbitrage, a trading strategy that exploits price mismatches between three different cryptocurrency pairs on exchanges. Also known as three-currency arbitrage, it’s not magic—it’s math. You start with one coin, swap it for a second, then that second for a third, and finally back to the first. If the final amount is more than what you started with, you made a profit. Simple in theory, almost impossible in practice today. This isn’t something you do on Binance or Coinbase with a click—it needs speed, low fees, and perfect timing. Most of the easy opportunities vanished years ago when bots started chasing these tiny gaps faster than any human ever could.

Still, decentralized exchanges, like Uniswap or Thruster v2, where prices aren’t always synced across liquidity pools, create the occasional opening. That’s why you’ll see posts here about Thruster v2, a Blast Layer 2 DEX with a 1.0% fee tier—it’s not just about yield farming. Its unique fee structure and liquidity depth can sometimes cause small, fleeting imbalances that a well-tuned bot might catch. But even then, the profit margin is often less than 0.5%. For most people, it’s not worth the gas fees, slippage, or risk of failed transactions.

What you’ll find in this collection aren’t guides on how to make millions from triangular arbitrage. Instead, you’ll find real breakdowns of what happens when these strategies fail, why they’re hard to execute, and how the underlying mechanics of blockchain trading, especially on Layer 2s and DEXs with varying fee tiers affect price discovery. We’ve got posts on exchanges like Aevo and StormGain that shut down, on tokens with zero supply, and on airdrops that turned out to be scams. All of them tie back to one truth: in crypto, the market moves fast, and if you’re not part of the algorithm, you’re just watching it. These articles help you understand why the system works the way it does—not to chase invisible profits, but to avoid getting burned by the very mechanics that create them.