Crypto-candle arbitrage: Up + Down < $1 never happens
If Up and Down ever sum below a dollar, buying both locks a riskless profit. We scanned for it 4,195 times, then tracked every market's entire life. Total opportunities: effectively zero.
The hypothesisFast crypto up/down markets must occasionally misprice: in a volatile moment, Up's ask plus Down's ask will dip below $1.00, and buying both sides locks a guaranteed profit at resolution. If not simultaneously, then across time — buy each side at its lifetime-cheapest moment.
The test
Probe one polled both order books of live 5-minute and hourly crypto candles and checked the ask-sum on every scan: 4,195 scans, zero sums below a dollar. Probe two granted the thesis every possible concession: track each market's entire life at 30-second resolution, record the minimum ask ever printed on each side, and ask whether even a trader with perfect foresight of both minima — buying each side at its historical cheapest — would have locked a profit net of the fee curve.
The result
Across 21,512 completed markets, the perfect-foresight pair cleared the fee-and-edge floor in 46 cases — 0.2% — and the average lifetime-minima margin was negative one cent: even omniscient timing loses money on the typical candle. The same-moment version simply never occurred. The books are quoted by market-making bots that maintain the sum above $1.00 plus their spread at all times, at every speed we could observe.
Conclusion
Textbook arbitrage does not survive in a market patrolled by professional makers — it is their inventory, not your opportunity. Any post showing an "Up+Down < $1" screenshot is showing you a stale display price, a one-sided book, or a moment that lasted less time than an order takes to land. This null became load-bearing for everything after it: if riskless money doesn't exist here, every risky "edge" on the series deserves the skepticism we subsequently applied — and it kept earning it.