Beginner's guide to write your own Solana arbitrage bot

What is this?

This tutorial walks you from zero to a production-ready bot in four progressive stages:

1. Understanding atomic arbitrage on Solana – the mental model you’ll need before touching code.

2. Bootstrapping a simple bot with Jupiter V6 – minimal effort.

3. Level-up: writing your own router – for searchers who want more control than Jupiter provides.

4. Going on-chain – pushing the arbitrage logic into a smart contract for the lowest possible latency.

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How Atomic Arbitrage Works on Solana 🥷

What “atomic” really means

On Solana you can bundle several swap instructions (e.g., buy on Orca, sell on Raydium) into a single transaction. If any leg fails the whole transaction is rolled back, so the trader takes no inventory risk – only the fee for a failed signature. This is possible because Solana validates all instructions before committing the block.

The life-cycle of an atomic arb

1. State read: a searcher maintains a live copy of DEX account data locally.

2. Route discovery: path-finding code spots two prices that diverge beyond a profit threshold.

3. Tx crafting: the bot builds a transaction with both swap instructions.

4. Submission strategy:

   • RPC – pay gas fee to the leader.

   • Jito bundle – pay a tip only when the bundle lands.

5. Settlement: either the whole trade lands (profit) or reverts (only fee lost).

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Building Your First Bot with Jupiter V6

Example transaction

Why Jupiter?

• Aggregates >30 DEXs, saving you the trouble of tracking every pool yourself.

• Ships a self-hosted binary (jupiter-swap-api) that you can query locally at millisecond latency.

Reference implementation

https://github.com/ChainBuff/sol-arb-bot

Alternative ready-made bots

SolanaMEVBot Jupiter bot – supports blind-quote and back-run strategies out of the box. Just edit config.toml.

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Advanced – Roll Your Own Router

Example transaction

Why leave Jupiter?

Need	Jupiter	Custom router
Full control over path search algorithm	Closed-source graph; you only get the REST API.	Write your own heuristics (e.g., favor depth over price).
Adding exotic pools	Wait for Jupiter to integrate.	Plug your adapter immediately.
Latency budget	5-20 ms typical self-hosted.	Can embed in the same process as your strategy for sub-5 ms.

Reference implementation

https://github.com/blockworks-foundation/autobahn

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Advanced – On-Chain Arbitrage Bots

Example transaction

Why push logic on-chain?

• Latency – state is read during execution, not before submission, eliminating the off-chain read phase.

• Speed – Instead of sending the tx after seeing an opportunity, you just keep sending and when there's profit your tx will take it.

• Hardware-light – no need for Yellowstone gRPC or a beefy validator; a $5 VPS works.

Reference implementation

Onchain program: https://github.com/buffalojoec/arb-program

Offchain bot: https://github.com/Cetipoo/solana-onchain-arbitrage-bot

Alternative ready-made bots

SolanaMEVBot Onchain bot – supports a large range of dexes. Just edit config.toml to run the bot.