Project Story
- About the project
Our project is a high-fidelity, low-latency "arbitrage brain" designed to identify and verify cross-chain arbitrage opportunities between L2 blockchains, specifically Base and Optimism.
Inspiration & Challenges
Our inspiration was the constant market friction between fragmented L2s. However, our real inspiration came from failure. We initially tried to build this monitor using standard aggregator APIs like 0x and 1inch. This was a dead end. We were met with KYC friction, misleading 404 - no Route matched errors, and silent, undocumented free-tier restrictions that blocked access to key chains like Arbitrum and Optimism.
We learned that relying on these "black box" APIs was unreliable and slow. We were spending 100% of our time debugging the API, not building our strategy.
How We Built It (The Pivot)
We threw the aggregators out and rebuilt our system from first principles. Our monitor (monitor-v8-direct.ts) is a pure, "no-API" solution:
- TypeScript First: We built the monitor in TypeScript, using
ethers.jsfor its type-safety, which immediately saved us from critical bugs (like abad address checksumerror on a copy-pasted contract address). - Direct RPC Connection: We connect directly to the blockchain using our own Alchemy RPC nodes for Base and Optimism. This removes the 3rd-party "middleman."
- On-Chain Source of Truth: Instead of asking an API for a "quote," we call the
getAmountsOutfunction directly on the on-chain Uniswap V2 / SushiSwap V2 router contracts.
This approach gives us the one thing no API could: 100% reliable, verifiable, slippage-included price data straight from the source.
Our monitor now successfully runs on our local machine, scanning for real, verifiable profit opportunities every 10 seconds. We have built a trusted "brain" that we can now attach an execution "body" to.
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