Method

USDT and USDC top gaining swaps include swaps that

• happened from the beginning of 2022,

• started with USDC or USDT (Asset ID 31566704 or 312769),

• converted into another token,

• and then converted the same amount of that token, by the same swapper, back to USDT or USDC (whichever the transaction began with),

• all transacted within less than a minute (here we apply the assumption that an arbitrage transaction takes place lightning fast (source), which is often made possible by automated arbitrage aka arb bots) for the swaps that begin with USDC,

• for the swaps that begin with USDT, we find that very few (11) transactions actually happen in under a minute, therefore we expand the definition to include swaps in under an hour.

The two tables above show the USDC and USDT swaps, ordered by the success of their arbitrage results: i.e. the arbitrage gain % compared to the starting amount of USDC or USDT token.

• Among top 3 transactions for each type of swap, we see more arbitrage gain in swaps that originated from USDC (12-25% per swap in the top 3). The highest-netting USDT-origin swap brought in 12% arbitrage gain, but after that the gains drop to 2%.

• For USDT-origin transactions, the most popular swap coin is the other stablecoin in this analysis: USDC.

• However with USDC-origin swaps, we not only see more gains but also more variety. AlgoGems and Algo Fam are popular tokens for higher-earning arb swaps. VoteCoin, Opulous and STBL are other popular tokens for profitable USDC swaps.

• We also find that several wallets repeatedly performed swaps with arbitrage gains.

What have been the average arbitrage gains per transaction for the swapping wallets?

(A note on the USDC and USDT arbitrage tables below: The asset ID columns in the table are automatically displayed in the $ amount format, however in the original data asset IDs are strings of digits, sans the two zeroes 00 at the end of the tables you see here.)

USDC vs. USDT Arbitrage

From the two tables above that aggregate arb results by wallet, we find that only 6 wallets made an average arbitrage gain with USDC-origin swaps, and only 2 wallets did the same with USDT-origin transactions.

Moreover, frequent swapping seems to have tampered gains. For instance, the wallets with maximum arbitrage gain (12% for USDT and 25% for USDC) averaged out to single-digit % gain per transaction.