On-chain Arbitrage & Cross-DEX MEV

You already know three things separately: how an AMM walks a price along a curve, how the right to order transactions in a block is auctioned, and how relative-value traders make money betting that two prices must converge. This course welds them into one machine. On-chain arbitrage is statistical arbitrage’s disciplined, capital-light cousin — except the venue is brutal in ways TradFi never is: every trade you make moves the price against you, you cannot short, and your whole strategy lives or dies as a single atomic transaction that someone else gets to order.

This sits at the very top of the crypto-quant ladder. It assumes you can already read an x·y=k pool, you know what a sandwich and a priority-gas auction are, and you’ve internalized the relative-value mindset of pairs trading and mean reversion. We take all of that and make it concrete, quantitative, and honest about where the money ends up.

The course builds the whole pipeline, edge to exit:

• The on-chain arb mindset — relative value with no shorting and atomic settlement; why the blockchain version is both safer (no inventory risk) and harsher (you compete in an auction you usually lose).
• Cross-DEX price discrepancies — how independent AMM curves drift apart, the exact constant-product math of buying cheap and selling dear, and why the optimal trade size is finite, not “as big as possible”.
• Triangular arbitrage — closing a loop of three pools when the product of the exchange rates drifts away from 1, with the no-arbitrage condition worked out.
• Atomic bundles & flash loans — packaging every leg into one all-or-nothing transaction, and borrowing the entire stake inside that transaction so capital stops being the barrier.
• The cost stack & the auction — gas, priority fees, the builder’s cut and slippage; backrunning vs sandwiching; and the uncomfortable result that competition bids most of the spread straight through to builders and validators.
• Edge, capacity & competition — the statistical edge of on-chain arb, why its capacity is tiny next to TradFi stat-arb, and how latency and the PBS supply chain decide who eats.

By the end, “the prices were different on two DEXs” stops being free money and becomes a fully-priced, adversarial, capacity-limited trade — one you can size, cost out, and reason about like the quant strategy it really is.