Perp–DEX Delta-Neutral Arbitrage

Directional risk at zero.
The spread does the work.

Znatok runs a proprietary arbitrage engine between perpetual futures and DEX spot: two offsetting legs, zero net exposure. Funding and basis do the work — not market direction.

What we build Get in touch
Hedged pair, live view
perp leg spot leg net Δ

Illustrative simulation — not live market data

Product

One engine, two legs, zero direction

Our core product is a fully automated trading system that simultaneously opens a short leg on a perpetual-futures market and a long leg on a decentralized spot market (or vice versa). The pair is sized to be delta-neutral from the first fill: whatever the market does, the two legs offset each other. Profit comes from the structural differences between venues — perpetual funding payments and price basis — not from market direction.

Leg 1 · Short Perpetual futures Hyperliquid · Aster · Lighter, collects funding
Δ = 0 hedged pair
Leg 2 · Long DEX spot Routed via 0x & Jupiter Swap API v2, holds the asset
≈ 0Net directional exposure
24/7Unattended live operation
Multi-venueCEX, perp-DEX & AMM connectivity
SecondsFrom signal to hedged pair

How it works

From opportunity scan to a balanced book

01 · SCAN

Opportunity scoring

The engine continuously scans funding rates, basis and liquidity across venues, normalizing different funding intervals to comparable APR and scoring each pair by expected payback vs. round-trip fees and historical stability.

02 · CHECK

Pre-flight validation

Before any order is sent, both venues are health-checked: order-book depth, API reachability, margin and balance sufficiency. If either side fails, the trade never starts.

03 · EXECUTE

Paired execution

Both legs are opened in a tightly coordinated sequence with slippage limits on each side. Position state is persisted atomically, so a restart never loses track of an open pair.

04 · HOLD & EXIT

Managed lifecycle

While the pair is open, funding accrues and both legs are monitored in real time. Exits are executed incrementally — the hedge is reduced in matched slices so the book stays balanced at every step.

In action

What one cycle looks like

znatok-engine · live session

Replay of a typical engine cycle, values illustrative.

Engine

Safety mechanisms we engineered in

Running delta-neutral pairs unattended across independent venues is mostly a reliability problem. These are the mechanisms our engine uses to keep the book balanced when networks fail, APIs stall, or one leg fills and the other doesn't.

Incremental hedged exits

Positions are never closed one leg at a time. The engine unwinds both legs in small matched increments, so net exposure stays near zero throughout the entire exit — even for large positions in thin books.

Naked-leg protection

If one leg fills and the counter-leg fails, the engine detects the unhedged exposure immediately, records it in a persistent store and raises an operator alert — it is treated as an incident, never ignored.

Order-book health gating

Every execution step re-validates live book depth and spread on both venues. A degraded or stale book on either side pauses the sequence instead of pushing orders into bad liquidity.

Position reconciliation

Local state is continuously reconciled against exchange-reported positions. Any divergence — a missed fill, an external liquidation, a venue outage — is flagged before it can compound.

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Funding-aware pair selection

Venues publish funding on different intervals and conventions. Our scoring layer normalizes them to a common APR, weights by historical sign-stability, and only trades pairs where fees are earned back within a strict payback window.

Kill-switch & alerting

A global kill-switch can flatten all positions across all venues in one command, with per-venue error isolation. Operators receive real-time alerts for every anomaly, on every channel, around the clock.

Connectivity

Venues & integrations we run on today

The engine is venue-agnostic by design — each integration is an adapter over a common execution core. Current production connectivity:

Perpetual-futures venues

Hyperliquid Aster Lighter

On-chain perpetual order books where the short leg is placed and funding is collected. Each adapter handles the venue's own funding interval, margin model and order semantics.

Spot routing & aggregation

0x Swap API · EVM Jupiter Swap API v2 · Solana

The spot leg is executed through aggregator routing — best-route execution across AMM liquidity with strict slippage limits on every fill.

Why it matters

Built for exchanges, not against them

We add liquidity and volume

Arbitrage flow is two-sided and non-toxic: we take both sides of structural imbalances, tighten cross-venue pricing, and generate consistent taker/maker volume without directional pressure on the market.

We are heavy, careful API users

Our systems rely on market-data streams, order placement and account endpoints around the clock. We engineer for exchange-friendly behavior: honest rate-limit budgeting, exponential backoff, and no request patterns that hammer infrastructure.

Let's talk

For exchange partnerships, API-limit inquiries, integrations or general questions.