$20,000 Profit from a Single Trade: How Much Can Solana DEX Arbitrage Really Make?
Preamble
In one of my previous articles, I shared how I built my own arbitrage bot on Solana — working with DEX liquidity pools and chaining multi-hop swaps into a single transaction.
On my Telegram, I’ve even posted a few mainnet examples where profits hit $2,000+ from just one trade. That was more for self-motivation than anything else.
📌 But let’s be clear: those kinds of wins are exceptions, not the rule. They don’t happen every day — but they dohappen, and that’s what makes this space so fascinating.
In this article, I want to step away from the hype of “big numbers” and dig into real averages:
- actual wallets in the wild,
- their transaction histories,
- and what monthly profit looks like in practice.
And if you’re new to crypto arbitrage, I’ll also give a quick primer before diving in.
Crypto Arbitrage on Solana 💥
At its core, arbitrage is simple: buy low, sell high.
In traffic arbitrage you buy clicks for $0.10 and sell them into an offer where each click pays $0.15. If conversion works — you’re in profit, if not — tough luck.
In crypto it’s the same logic:
On Solana it gets way more interesting:
- dozens of DEXs, thousands of liquidity pools
- the same token priced differently across pools
- a bot finds a price gap and executes a multi-hop swap inside a single atomic transaction
📈 That’s the magic — chaining swaps through a custom smart contract so everything settles at once.
How it looks on CEX
On centralized exchanges, arbitrage usually means:
- buying BTC on futures and selling on spot (same exchange), or
- buying on Binance and selling on Bybit (cross-exchange).
📌 The idea is always the same: enter and exit in the same asset, just at different prices.
On Solana DEXs it’s different
- No order books, no databases.
- Everything runs directly on-chain.
- Which means you can do what CEX never allows: atomic multi-hop swaps across liquidity pools.
All in one atomic transaction.
End result: you get back the same token you started with — only with profit.
Why is this safe?
That’s the beauty of a multi-hop swap through a smart contract:
- If any step in the chain fails — the entire transaction rolls back.
- Meaning: you can’t physically lose money on a failed route.
Here’s why: when the bot sends the instruction to the blockchain, it includes strict conditions (minimum amounts at each step). If even one swap doesn’t meet that condition — Solana rejects the whole transaction. No partial fills, no half-losses.
Why Solana?
I never even tried building this on Ethereum or other chains — for obvious reasons:
That’s why all my arbitrage experience is on Solana, and that’s the chain I’m talking about here.
Alright, now that we’ve got the base covered — let’s get into the numbers.
Where to Look at Transactions
If you want to get serious about arbitrage on Solana, you’ll need to get comfortable with monitoring and on-chain analytics tools.
There are plenty of them out there, each serving a slightly different purpose. I’ve tried most of them and narrowed down the ones that actually help with finding trades, tracking wallets, and analyzing liquidity movements.
This isn’t going to be a deep-dive review of every tool I use — more of a high-level map so you understand what’s out there and when to use it.
1) Solscan.io
The go-to Solana blockchain explorer.
- Full transaction history for any wallet
- Detailed breakdown of every swap, fee, and contract call
- Great for digging into interesting wallets and seeing how they trade
📌 When to use: you find an interesting transaction and want to see exactly how it works under the hood.
2) Solana Explorer
The official explorer from Solana Labs.
- A bit more “raw” than Solscan
- Sometimes shows details Solscan doesn’t render
- Especially useful for debugging complex CPI flows
📌 When to use: if Solscan misses something, check here.
3) DexScreener
For tracking prices, volumes, and liquidity across DEX pairs.
- Nice charts, candles, token summaries
- Quick way to check volatility or new pool activity
- Has a “new pools” tab — a goldmine for catching fresh (and risky) tokens
📌 When to use: quick pool analysis and tracking where the money’s moving.
4) gmgn.ai
Wallet and pool tracker with a focus on early coins and meme tokens.
- Less chart-heavy than DexScreener, but deeper trade-by-trade detail
- New tokens/pools often appear here earlier than anywhere else
- Shows wallet PnL, differentiates bots from humans, and tags big wallets
📌 When to use: catching early moves, analyzing profitable wallets, spotting who’s behind the trades.
5) Dune Analytics
Advanced dashboards and SQL-powered analytics.
- Works for Solana and many other chains
- Great for aggregated data: volumes, DEX activity, ROI by strategy
- Used for “big picture” insights rather than single trades
📌 When to use: building meta-analysis instead of just trade-level digging.
Bottom line
These aren’t competitors — they’re pieces of the same stack. I personally use several at once depending on the job.
For our case here, we’ll stick with Solscan.io.
How Much Can You Actually Make With Solana Arbitrage? 💥
Example 1
Wallet: 888DUdR3P4fYa4Es5AVvJhoqwQGhFV56NotdHt2gz3e1
First thing that jumps out? A hefty balance — about $45K sitting in SOL, plus nearly a million spread across tokens.
Scroll down to the transaction history and it gets even more interesting: this wallet is constantly moving. Swaps fire off every few minutes, trade sizes vary, but the rhythm is steady.
That’s a dead giveaway you’re looking at an arbitrage bot running a live strategy, cycling liquidity nonstop.
On the right side of the screen you’ll see a list of transactions — each one tagged with the logos of the pools it routed through. That’s basically the arbitrage chains in action. Just in the last two minutes, this wallet fired off eight separate swaps.
🕒 The timestamp for each transaction sits in the third column from the left.
💵 The swap size is in the third column from the right.
Important note: the swap size ≠ profit. It’s just the volume of the trade. But volumes tell a story — they hint at the structure of the strategy: how much capital is being cycled, how often, and across which tokens and pools.
Let’s crack open a few transactions. But first — quick note on what we’re actually looking for, so we don’t get lost.
📌 Every arbitrage transaction runs through multiple swap steps — usually 2–3, sometimes more.
But for us, only two points matter:
- The first step → which asset goes in, and how much
- The last step → how much of that same asset comes back out
The gap between input and output = pure profit.
Everything in between we can ignore for now — it’s just the routing logic. Useful for deep dives, but not critical when you just want to check earnings.
In Solscan, you can dig up tons of extra info if you know where to look. But in this piece I’ll keep it simple — just show you where to glance to spot the profit.
📸 On the first screenshot I’ll mark with arrows the input and the output. After that, you’ll know how to read it yourself.
Input: $22.06 → Output: $22.35
Input: $85.62 → Output: $85.96
Input: $256.59 → Output: $260.3
Input: $2,452.98 → Output: $2,453.05
Looking at this wallet’s activity — around 20 transactions in 4 minutes (roughly 5 per minute). If we take an average profit of ~$0.20 per transaction, the math is simple:
💰 Pretty solid, especially when the bot runs on full autopilot.
But — this is just one case. If you want to be more precise, you can dig deeper: either check trades manually or write a quick script to parse the wallet’s history and calculate profits.
📌 And no, this isn’t the ceiling. There are wallets making way more. Still, don’t build illusions — in the beginning even a stable $20–40 a day is already a strong sign your strategy is alive and kicking.
Example 2
Wallet: EjwdVLEr4Gsnsu1YMVg3RVsBSfsxekrRjBGv2BPE6tSV
- ~$30,000 sitting in SOL on the main balance
- ~$160,000 in various tokens
- On average, this wallet is firing off 2 transactions per minute
So yeah — definitely an active arb bot at work here, rotating decent size and keeping the strategy running around the clock.
Let’s zoom into a few transactions to see what’s actually going on here — volumes in, volumes out, and the net profit on each.
Here you can see the bot’s running a bit leaner — the average profit per trade is noticeably smaller.
But don’t forget: this is all happening fully on autopilot.
Let’s say the average profit is only $0.03 per trade. With ~20 trades every 5 minutes, that adds up to:
💡 For something that requires zero manual work, that’s a pretty solid return.
Headliners of the Show 💥
To wrap things up, let’s take a look at the top 5 trades — the kind of transactions where the profit alone could buy you a car. These are rare gems, often running on completely different strategies than the day-to-day bots we just reviewed.
But hey, a little motivation never hurts:
$70,000 from a single swap
$31,500 from one trade
$28,255 from one swap
$20,542 from a single trade
$20,107 in one go
💡 They don’t happen every day, but these trades are living proof of what’s possible when the right strategy meets the right market conditions.
🔷 Conclusion
Arbitrage on Solana isn’t magic or a lottery — it’s a systematic strategy that, when set up correctly, can consistently generate profit.
To make it work long-term, you’ll need to:
- Run a well-written and optimized bot
- Experiment with different strategies and refine them
- Use paid RPC endpoints for speed (free or trial ones can still work, but expect more slippage)
- Analyze liquidity pools and market trends
- Understand swap mechanics and work across multiple DEX types — AMM, CLMM, OrderBook, etc.
Pulling off a $2,000 profit in a single swap? Totally possible — but rare, and usually requires strong hardware plus your own node for fast mempool tracking (not the same as a validator).
But hitting $20–50 per day on autopilot? That’s absolutely achievable.
From there, it’s all about discipline, curiosity, and the willingness to dig deep.