Crypto arbitrage calculator

The gross spread is the headline number: the raw percentage gap between the price on the cheap exchange and the price on the expensive one. It looks like profit, but it is only the starting point. Three separate costs stand between the spread and the money you actually keep, and each one comes out of your pocket whether the trade goes well or not.

First, trading fees. Most exchanges charge a taker fee of around 0.1% per trade, and an arbitrage trade has two legs: a buy and a sell. That is roughly 0.2% of your trade size gone before anything else happens. On a 1% spread, fees alone have already eaten a fifth of the opportunity.

Second, the withdrawal fee. To sell on the second exchange you have to move the coin there, and blockchain transfers are not free. The fee is usually a flat amount in the coin itself, which is why it hits small trades hardest: a $2 network fee is irrelevant on a $10,000 trade and fatal on a $100 one. The same coin can also cost wildly different amounts to move depending on which network you pick, which is why the transfer network matters as much as the exchanges.

Third, slippage and depth. The quoted price is only good for the quantity actually sitting on the order book at that level. Push a larger order through a thin book and your average fill price walks away from the quote, shrinking the spread you thought you had. This calculator assumes clean fills at your prices, so treat its output as the optimistic case and size your trades to the liquidity that really exists.

The breakeven figure ties it together: it is the minimum gross spread that covers both fees and the withdrawal cost at your trade size. Any spread below it is a guaranteed loss, no matter how tempting the gap looks. For a deeper walk through the math, read Spread vs. net profit, and for what can still go wrong after the math works, see the risks of crypto arbitrage.