Market making was the pros' cheat code for farming. Arbital just handed it to everyone.

Market making was the pros' cheat code for farming. Arbital just handed it to everyone.

The insight in one line: a points program pays the same points for a dollar of volume whoever produces it, but the cost of producing that dollar is not the same. Takers pay the most. Makers pay less, sometimes get paid, and if the venue also runs a rebate pool, the net cost of a point can fall close to zero. Professional market makers have farmed exchanges this way for years. Arbital packages it for anyone, and since August 21, 2026 anyone can use it. The step-by-step setup lives in the Arbital airdrop guide ; this page is about why it works and how to judge whether it is working for you.

As of October 2026: Arbital is open to the public with no token or points announced, and its Ondo Perps competition ended August 13, so the payoff is the points and rebates on the venues it farms.

The real cost of a point

When I tested Arbital's market-making bot on Ondo Perps, I stopped thinking about "fees spent" and started thinking about net cost:

Net cost = fees paid, minus venue rebates, minus bot PnL (if positive).

• Fees paid are capped by the fee budget you set. On my first run, a small budget on a $41 balance was estimated to produce $30,000 to $40,000 of volume.
• Venue rebates are the multiplier. Ondo Perps pays a weekly USDC pool split by volume share (about 175,000 USDC a week when I recorded), plus Ondo Points. Your bot's volume earns both.
• PnL can go either way. Mine started negative, but a neutral maker bot can finish positive and pay for some of its own fees.

So if I budget $50 in fees and the rebate returns $10, I really spent $40, and the points came almost for free. That is the edge. Most people never see it because they only look at the fee line.

Why manual trading loses this game

By hand, you take liquidity, you pay taker fees, and you hold direction you did not need. You will not reach a meaningful volume quota without burning money, and you can lose your whole principal to liquidation. I have. A maker bot with a neutral bias, a fee cap and a max loss turns farming from a bet into a budget.

Competitions are a second rebate (when they run)

Arbital also runs prize pools on partner venues. When I recorded, its Ondo Perps competition offered a $6,000 share for anyone above $300,000 of volume, rising to $20,000 if total volume hit $100M by August 13, and only 105 wallets qualified. That one has ended, as has Phoenix's 420,000 USDC Flight Club (closed August 23). The lesson stands: when a venue or Arbital runs a pool with a hard threshold and few qualifiers, your maker volume can earn twice.

The retroactive option

Arbital added Phoenix , which has no token or points yet. Volume you build there through a bot is cheap optionality: if Phoenix ever rewards past activity, you qualified at a discount.

Where it sits in the automation stack

Arbital runs maker market making to farm points at the lowest cost. TreadFi runs bots across many venues and has its own token, TREAD, with another airdrop coming, but it does not cover every Arbital venue, so I keep both. My own Hyperider turns perp volume into a game. Same shift in all three: the next wave of perp-DEX airdrops goes to people who automated the grind.

The honest part

Cheaper is not risk-free. A maker bot holds inventory; inventory can move against you; leverage cuts both ways. Arbital gives you a fee budget and a max loss, and they only help if you set them tight and start small. Arbital has no token announced, so the reliable payoff is the venues it farms, with any Arbital drop as upside.

The founder lens

Arbital is a clean example of a durable pattern: take an advantage only insiders can reach and productize it for everyone. The maker edge existed; the barrier was tooling. Robinhood did this for commission-free trading, Pendle for yield trading, Arbital for market-making incentives. The best opportunities are often not new advantages, but old ones locked behind access.

Build it

The missing piece is measurement: a dashboard that pulls each venue's weekly rebate pool, your bot's fees and PnL, and your points, and prints net cost per point by venue. If you spot an edge like this, packaging it is a company. Ship the first version with us (Deployr ), and ceoism is the founder path.

Do this