PSA: On Coinbase, ETC is still trading more than 20% above all other exchanges. If you have ETC on Coinbase, you have the opportunity to sell it and buy it back on another exchange for an instant 20% arbitrage opportunity.

What is arbitrage?Arbitrage is profiting from the price imperfections between several pairs on a given exchange, or between different exchanges. It is the only reason prices even stay close to each other from one exchange to the other to begin with: a multitude of bots are developed to profit from such price differences, and thus help the market in having somewhat unified prices.How could I profit from it in this case?(Mandatory) Already have ETC on Coinbase.(Mandatory) Have access to another exchange that trades ETC at the "normal" price.Sell ETC on Coinbase around 9.5 USD (at the time of writing) and Buy it back on another exchange around 7.7 USD(T).Profit! You effectively sold your ETC for 9.5 USD and bought it back for 7.7. You now have the same amount of ETC, and ~1.8 USD per ETC bonus because of this operation.Why does it happen in this case? Why is it still not resolved?Since ETC was 51% attacked several times throughout the past years, Coinbase has decided that to deposit ETC on their platform, you would need 91,000 blockchain confirmations. This is approximately 2 weeks. In other words, you need to wait 2 weeks for you ETC deposit to arrive on Coinbase.Under normal circumstances, the price inefficiency would be solved immediately because deposits and withdrawals would happen in a matter of minutes/hours, and the new price would land somewhere in between the 2. But in this case since no one can bring ETC to Coinbase, this imperfection could last up to 2 weeks, at which point the inflows of ETC will start coming in to profit from this arbitrage opportunity.Who are you and why do you care?Merely a bot developer, my daily job is to code Crypto trading bots and to earn money for myself and clients for a fee. In the process and using what I learned so far, I try to help other less fortunate people that are missing some key trading concepts, or are simply new to the ecosystem.Any question you ever had about Trading that is still puzzling you? Feel free to drop it below and I'll see if I can have a shot at it! If not, I am sure other people in the subreddit would be delighted to do the same.

Submitted January 15, 2021 at 04:22AM