Glossary
Atomic Arbitrage
MEV arbitrage executed in a single transaction — buy on one venue, sell on another, repay any flash loan — with the trade either fully succeeding or fully reverting.
Atomic arbitrage is the cleanest form of on-chain arbitrage: a single transaction borrows, trades across two or more venues, and repays — with the entire operation reverting if it fails to be profitable. There is no inventory risk, no funding risk, and no counterparty risk beyond the on-chain contracts.
Flash loans make atomic arbitrage capital-light: a searcher can arbitrage millions of dollars of price discrepancy without holding any inventory beforehand. The category is the bulk of "benign" MEV on Ethereum and most EVM chains.