Boris runs the numbers on 27 arbitrage opportunities flagged today, led by an 8.46% Bitunix-to-Bybit spread on MOVE. Full breakdown of the top five plays, exchange-pair patterns, fee-adjusted profit math, and what to watch tomorrow.
Twenty-seven arbitrage opportunities crossed the desk today, and if you trade cross-exchange spreads for a living, this was not a quiet session. The board was dominated by one ticker in particular — MOVE showed up six separate times in the top ten, which tells you either the token's liquidity is fractured across venues right now, or one exchange's order book got left behind while the others repriced. Either way, six independent MOVE spreads in a single session is not noise, it's a pattern, and patterns are what arb desks are built to exploit.
The best print of the day was an 8.46% spread on MOVE — buy on Bitunix at $0.008322, sell on Bybit at $0.009020. That's a real number, not a stale-quote artifact, and it sat near the top of a board that also included a 7.94% SQD spread between KuCoin and Binance Futures, a trio of additional MOVE spreads in the 6.88%–7.86% range spanning Bybit Spot, OKX Spot and Binance, a 6.44% GPS spread between Bitget and Binance Futures, a 5.76% FARTCOIN spread between Bybit and Bitget, and two TRUMP spreads north of 5% linking KuCoin, OKX and Coinbase. Ten opportunities cleared 5% today, which is well above what you'd expect on a normal session for large-cap pairs — this is small/mid-cap fragmentation doing what it does best.
Volume and flow totals for the session came back flat at $0.0M on the aggregator's pump/dump and buy/sell pressure counters, which means today's signal is coming purely from the price-discovery layer — order book spread detection, not volume-confirmed directional flow. That's an important distinction for how you should treat this report: these are legitimate cross-exchange price dislocations, but I don't have hard fill-volume numbers to hand you for sizing decisions. Treat every trade size below as illustrative, and check the actual order book depth on both legs before committing capital. More on that under Risk Alerts.
The clearest pattern in today's data is OKX Spot sitting on the expensive side of the trade repeatedly — it's the sell leg in three of today's top five MOVE spreads (against Bybit Spot twice, Binance once), plus it's the sell leg on one of the two TRUMP spreads. When one exchange shows up as the systematic "expensive" venue across multiple unrelated tickers in the same session, that's usually either a regional demand skew (OKX draws different retail flow than Bybit or Binance) or a temporary quoting lag on OKX's matching engine relative to faster-updating competitors. Worth tracking over the next few sessions to see if it's a one-day anomaly or a recurring structural premium.
Bybit shows up on both sides of the ledger today — cheap against OKX on MOVE, but expensive against Bitunix on the day's single biggest spread, and expensive again against Bitget on the FARTCOIN print. That's consistent with Bybit being a genuinely deep, fairly-priced venue that other, thinner exchanges (Bitunix) or differently-flow-skewed venues (Bitget) drift away from in either direction. Binance Futures appears as the expensive leg on both the SQD and GPS spreads — futures markets pricing at a premium to spot on smaller-cap names is a classic sign of long-biased leverage demand outrunning spot supply, and it's worth checking funding rates on both those pairs before assuming the futures premium is a pure arb rather than a crowded long trade correcting itself.
KuCoin and Coinbase both showed up exactly once each today, on the two TRUMP spreads, both as the buy-side (cheap) leg against KuCoin and the sell-side (expensive) leg on Coinbase respectively — consistent with Coinbase's historically slower-to-move but stickier US retail pricing on politically-themed tokens. No Hyperliquid prints appeared in today's data at all, so nothing to say there this session — worth keeping an eye on for tomorrow given how often perp-DEX pricing diverges from CEX spot during volatile stretches.
There's a real tradeoff on today's board between the fast, small, tight spreads (the sub-7% MOVE prints between Bybit and OKX, both deep venues) and the slower, larger, riskier ones (the Bitunix-to-Bybit 8.46% print, where one leg sits on a genuinely thinner exchange). The deep-venue spreads close fast — often within a single-digit number of minutes — because both sides are watched by enough market-making bots that the gap gets arbitraged away quickly, which means less time-in-trade risk but also a shorter window to actually get filled at the quoted price. The thin-venue spreads (Bitunix) last longer precisely because fewer bots bother routing through the smaller exchange, but that persistence comes at the cost of real slippage risk on entry and withdrawal-timing risk on the transfer leg.
Slippage is the silent killer on all of today's sub-$0.03 tickers — MOVE, SQD and GPS are all trading at fractions of a cent to a few cents, which means the visible top-of-book quote is rarely representative of what you'll actually get filled at beyond a few thousand dollars of notional. My rule of thumb for tokens in this price range: assume 0.3%–0.8% of effective slippage per leg on anything beyond $5,000–$10,000 notional, scaling up fast from there. Position sizing recommendation: split intended size into three to four tranches and ladder into both legs rather than firing one market order — you'll capture a worse average price than the headline spread implies, but you avoid the single-order book-walk that turns an 8% spread into a 3% realized one. For the deep-venue Bybit/OKX pairs, you can run larger single-clip size since both books are thicker; for anything touching Bitunix, stay conservative.
Let's walk through the math on the day's headline trade — MOVE, buy Bitunix $0.008322 / sell Bybit $0.009020, on an illustrative $10,000 position. These fee assumptions are typical taker-tier defaults, not exchange-verified for today's specific tier, so treat the framework as reusable rather than gospel.
That net figure still clears comfortably, which is why this trade made the top of the list — but notice how much of the headline 8.46% got eaten before you ever touch the withdrawal-timing risk itself. On a tighter spread, the same fee stack changes the calculus entirely. Take a hypothetical 2% spread on a similar thin/deep exchange pair: 0.20% round-trip taker fees, plus a flat withdrawal fee that's a larger percentage drag on smaller position sizes, plus 0.3%–0.5% slippage, and you're often down to 1%–1.2% net — thin enough that a five-minute delay in withdrawal confirmation can turn the trade into a wash or a loss if the spread mean-reverts while you wait. My working floor: for withdrawal-based cross-exchange arb, I don't chase anything under roughly 1.5%–2% gross spread — below that, fees and slippage consume too much of the edge to justify the operational risk. For futures-basis plays like the SQD trade (no withdrawal needed), that floor can come down closer to 0.5%–0.8% gross, since you're not eating a transfer-timing tax.
Withdrawal delays are the number one killer of cross-exchange arb today, full stop. Every trade in the top five except the SQD futures-basis play requires physically moving tokens between exchanges, and network congestion, exchange-side security holds on withdrawals, or simple queue backups can turn a profitable spread into a loss if the price mean-reverts before your transfer confirms. Always check an exchange's current withdrawal processing time before committing — Bitunix in particular, as the smaller venue in today's top trade, is worth a manual check on withdrawal queue status before you route capital through it.
Liquidity on all of today's featured tickers — MOVE, SQD, GPS, FARTCOIN, TRUMP — is thin relative to majors. None of these are BTC or ETH-tier books, and the aggregator's flat $0.0M volume/pressure readout today means I don't have hard depth numbers to hand you, so verify order book depth manually on both legs before sizing up. Also flag: six MOVE spreads inside one session is itself a mild risk signal — it can mean genuine cross-exchange fragmentation worth trading, or it can mean one exchange's price feed is stale or glitched. If you see a MOVE spread that looks too good relative to the others, check the raw order book on the outlier venue before routing size into it — a stale quote is a fast way to get a rejected or badly-filled order.
Watch MOVE first thing — six spreads in one session across four different exchange pairs (Bitunix/Bybit, Bybit/OKX ×3, Binance/OKX) means this token's cross-venue pricing is unsettled right now, and unsettled tickers tend to stay unsettled for a few sessions before liquidity providers fully arb them flat. OKX Spot specifically is worth flagging as the venue to watch — it sat on the expensive side against both Bybit and Binance repeatedly today, and if that premium persists into tomorrow's session it starts to look structural rather than incidental.
SQD and GPS both showed a spot/futures basis pattern against Binance Futures — keep an eye on Binance funding rates on both names overnight; if funding stays elevated, expect the basis to persist or widen into tomorrow, which is good news if you're already positioned and bad news if you're chasing a compression trade. Best times to watch: the highest-quality spreads on thin venues like Bitunix tend to open during low-liquidity windows — late US evening into Asia morning hours — when fewer market makers are actively quoting across all venues simultaneously. Keep KuCoin/OKX and OKX/Coinbase on your TRUMP watchlist too; political-narrative tokens are volatility-driven and a single headline can reopen both of today's spreads wider before the session's out.
Twenty-seven spreads, one clean 8.46% headline, and a market that's still figuring out where MOVE should actually trade. Do the fee math before you click buy, size for the thin leg not the thick one, and don't chase anything under roughly 1.5% after you account for withdrawal timing. See you at the next dislocation.
Arbitrage Hunter — August 23, 2026