Crypto expert, arbitrage trader and investor
Crypto expert and hands-on crypto arbitrage trader, investor and software developer with over 20 years of experience. On the P2P.Army blog he covers exchange news, P2P and cross-exchange arbitrage.
68 articles
Antonio Merkle is a crypto expert and hands-on crypto arbitrage trader, an investor and a software developer with over 20 years of experience.
On the P2P.Army blog he covers crypto exchange and P2P platform news and writes reviews, ratings and arbitrage courses — based on official sources and P2P.Army data.
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Questions about an article: Telegram @p2p_army_support or support@p2p.army
How to pay with Pix on Gate’s buy page and receive USDT in your Spot account, with the limits Gate showed on November 15, 2026, and a live calculator that shows when a Pix P2P ad gets you more USDT.
A bought option risks only the premium, while a sold one risks everything, and its margin is held until expiry. We go through options arbitrage risks with numbers: how much margin a $3,600 call needs, what happens in a volatility spike and why a cross-currency setup is not a lock.
Without filters, the top of the table is taken by far out-of-the-money options with “spreads” of tens of percent — on a penny premium that is worth nothing. We look at which filters to turn on, how to switch between cross-exchange and parity, how to set alerts and what to check before entering.
A call minus a put with the same strike behaves like the underlying minus the strike. If the link breaks, it can be locked in with three trades on one exchange. We check parity on live prices and see why a 0.34% “deviation” is usually basis, not free money.
The P2P.Army options scanner looks for identical options with different prices on four exchanges and sorts the findings into four types: from the rare “true lock” to “watch”, where fees eat the gap. We go through the table, the setup page and calculate a live example to the end.
We take one option — BTC, 80,000 strike, December 25 expiry — and look at its prices on four exchanges in the same minute. Within one settlement currency there is nothing to earn, while between coin and USDT a gap shows. We look at where it comes from and what is left of it.
A December BTC option with an 80,000 strike exists on all four exchanges, but on Deribit and OKX it is paid in bitcoin, on Binance and Bybit in USDT, and each exchange has its own index, contract size and fee cap. We go through the differences that later explain price gaps.
An option premium is intrinsic value plus payment for time and uncertainty. The market expresses uncertainty as implied volatility, and the price’s sensitivity to the market as the Greeks. We cover it all on a real BTC option and the DVOL index.
An option is the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell an asset at a pre-agreed price. We go through the basics and build the payoff profile of a BTC call and put with an 80,000 strike on real quotes from October 31, 2026.
A spread is money nobody has taken. Sometimes because they were not fast enough, but more often because taking it is costly or dangerous. We look at the risks of spread trades and cases when neutral positions lost money — from a $300 ETH price gap between exchanges to the closure of BitMEX.
The spread in the table is the best prices, not your fill price. We look at how the order book turns a 1.5% spread into a smaller number, how to open two legs without being left with one, and calculate the whole trade from entry to exit.
The screener combines spot and futures from dozens of exchanges into pairs and sorts them by price spread. We read the table on real rows, the filters, the pair page and a checklist: why a 5% spread on a sub-cent coin is more often a trap than an opportunity.
