How I earned a virtually risk-free 1.5 ETH by arbitraging Bitcoin Gold price difference on Bittrex and HitBTC

Here at CoinFi, we’ve been working on alpha testing for multiple different trading signals, as you can see in the other posts here on the blog.

One signal we’ve had some fun testing, is identifying arbitrage opportunities between exchanges, allowing you to make risk-free gains just by clicking a few buttons.

For example, in one experiment, our co-founder Tim exploited a 3% price difference between Ripio/BTC on Binance and Bittrex, to slightly increase his BTC stack.

2-3% doesn’t sound like a lot, but just by doing ONE trade per week, over the course of a year you can double your stack, risk-free.

That sounds like a pretty good risk:reward ratio to me.

Now, in my case, I was able to take advantage of an even bigger arbitrage opportunity earlier in the week. Using the Bitcoin Gold price difference between Bittrex and HitBTC I was able to earn myself an extra 1.5 Ethereum, just by picking up BTG on HitBTC, sending it to Bittrex, and then selling it for more.

If I’d have been prepared in advance and held BTG and Ethereum on both exchanges already, I would have doubled my money.

Either way, if it weren’t for the CoinFi signal letting me know about the arbitrage opportunity, I would have completely missed it. Free money is always nice, especially when you don’t have to spend hours trawling exchanges, waiting for another opportunity to come up.

In this post, I’ll share exactly what happened and talk more about the CoinFi signals we’re developing.

Part 1: The Background

A couple of days prior, Tim had been talking about the signal we’d developed. At this point it was very much a work in progress (and still is), so the rest of us didn’t have access to it.

On the day in question though, Tim and Han were about to hop on a call, when the signal notified them of the huge opportunity underway. Since they were busy, I did the honors of making the money. Cheers guys, next round is on me.

1.) The first thing I did was transfer any ETH I had on hand to HitBTC. I had recently cashed out a couple of ICO’s, so I had about 6.5 ETH spare. Great!

2.) I transferred it to HitBTC, double checked the prices were still in my favor, and bought about 11.1 Bitcoin Gold. I wasn’t fussed about trying to get the best price, I wanted to act fast instead.

Based on the price of BTG at Bittrex, I’d be able to turn that 6.5 ETH into about 11.5 ETH if I acted quickly. For USD purposes, I bought BTG at about $222 on HitBTC, and it was trading at about $418 at Bittrex. That’s a huge spread!

Part 2: Grinding To A Halt

It turns out, the reason for the huge spread was that HitBTC, and perhaps the whole Bitcoin Gold network, were having speed issues. As soon as I tried to withdraw BTG from from HitBTC account and send it over to Bittrex, I realized that the chatroom (Trollbox) was filled with people complaining about slow withdrawals of BTG.

I panicked, but realized that if everybody was having withdrawal issues, the spread wasn’t going to get closed any time soon. So I just had to be patient and hope it got processed soon.

Part 3: Taking Profits

It took a whopping TEN hours for the coins to transfer across to Bittrex, but when they did, I still came out ahead.

Naturally, the spread had closed by this point, probably because of all the people ahead of me in the withdrawal queue finally selling their coins. Still, I was able to sell those 11.09 BTG (minus the fees) for 8.08 ETH, a gain of 1.5 ish ETH ($500-600).

Now, if I’d had BTG already on Bittrex, I would have been able to double up risk free. So in future, when using the arbitrage signal, I’m going to make sure I have coins across 2-3 exchanges, and the BTC/ETH available to buy them on those exchanges too.

What really matters though is that without the signal telling me about the opportunity, I wouldn’t have made any money, so I’ll take my 25% profit any day of the week.

Other Thoughts – How Can You Do The Same?

You may be thinking a few thoughts right now. You may even be thinking “It’s not that impressive to make 25% over the course of 10 hours, a lot of coins swing that much anyway. You don’t need to use arbitrage to do that.”

To that comment I’d say, that may be true, but the signal made me money, so make of that what you will. As I explained above, in future I will be better prepared and will be able to make profits in minutes, risk free. That’s huge.

Additionally, you probably could make money just by riding pumps indeed. Luckily, CoinFi are working on a signal to help you do that as well.

For example, you could have made 50% profit in 12 hours just by trading Neo’s rise from last week. Tim put together this video showing how you could have used a CoinFi signal (currently in testing stage) to catch that wave too.

We’re not just going to be one-trick ponies here at CoinFi, we’re working on dozens of trading signals, and starting with the most popular ones first, as soon as the ICO is finished.

If you want to get early access to those signals, or have a say in which ones we build out first, then join the Telegram channel, get whitelisted for our ICO, and participate in bringing Wall Street level trading signals to the Crypto world. Once the CoinFi platform is fully built, you’ll need to stake COF tokens to get access, so it’s better to pick them up at their cheapest price.