How it works at start

You only need quote-asset in all the exchanges you want to use, it will tell you if you need to add more. If you put 1000 as balance and use 4 exchanges, you need 250 quote-asset in each exchanges. An extra margin is recommended for fees and small losses than can occur.

The Barbotine arbitrage bot works with what we'll call "sessions". At the beginning of each session, the Barbotine arbitrage bot buys the equivalent of (b/n) / 2 of crypto, with b = total balance and n = the number of exchanges.

You can set in the configuration the time between each session renewal, and you can also disable sessions (it will run a session with an infinite renew delay).

To buy the asset, the bot currently calculates an average price between all the exchanges, and put a limit order on all exchanges at that price. This way, we're sure that we have the exact same quantity of the asset, bought at the same price (no slippage).

The problem with this method is with shitcoins or small-cap assets, because the last price between exchanges on this asset is often very different from one to another, so the average order never gets filled. Soon, there will be an option to enable for illiquid markets like that. It will send orders at different prices by taking into account the slippage, without "last" price, but with order-precision level (best ask price).

Assuming we have an average price between exchange of 1 BTC = 60,000 USDT, this is the balances before you start the bot:

Balances of all exchanges before starting the bot

And this is the balances after the bot made the automatic purchases, needed to take opportunities:

Balances of all exchanges before starting the bot

As you can see, it purchased BTC with half the USDT, 125 USDT = 125/60000 ≈ 0.00208 BTC. It then is ready to take opportunities.