I’ve recently been looking at arbitrage the way you’d make a sandwich: you think you’re getting a big win with ham and lettuce in between, but one bite in and it’s all sauce—slippage, funding rates, transaction fees, plus the “invisible tax” of your own shaky hand chasing the price. Put simply, many opportunities do exist, but someone else with faster execution and cheaper routes takes the first bite—and what you’re left holding is probably just the bread crust.

Over the past couple of days, there’s been another wave of testnet incentive noise and point-scoring hype flying around. Everyone’s guessing whether the mainnet will issue a token… I love the excitement too, but before I actually jump in, I’ll do the math first: am I earning the spread on this trade, or am I just contributing transaction fees and funding rates to someone else? The noise-reduction strategy is just one line: focus only on the “net gains” that actually land in your account, and treat everything else as side dishes.