"Automated arbitrage" can mean almost anything depending on who's selling it. Here's what actually happens between the moment you link an exchange and the moment a funding payment lands in your account.
Step 1: Connecting without exposure
When you link an exchange, Ionide asks for API keys scoped to trading only — never withdrawals. That's a deliberate boundary, not a suggestion: even if a key were somehow compromised, it couldn't be used to move funds off the exchange. Your assets stay in your own exchange account the entire time, and Ionide only ever acts within the permissions you've granted. See Setting Up API Keys Safely for the exact steps per exchange.
Step 2: Picking a pool
A "pool" is a market and leverage combination — for example, a specific pair on Bitget at a chosen leverage level. Pools exist so you can match the strategy to your own risk preference: lower leverage trades smaller funding payments for smaller drawdowns during rate flips; higher leverage does the opposite. Ionide doesn't pick this for you — you do, once, at setup.
Step 3: Continuous pair selection
Inside a pool, the engine watches funding rates across supported markets in real time. It isn't running on a fixed schedule or reacting to a single signal — it's comparing opportunities continuously and opening spot-futures pairs where the funding rate justifies the position, sized according to your chosen leverage.
Step 4: Managing the position
Once a pair is open, the job shifts to monitoring, not just holding. If a funding rate weakens or flips, the engine can close or resize the position rather than let it become a drag. This is the part that's genuinely hard to do manually — funding rates update every few hours, all day, across every supported market, and a human checking in twice a day will miss most of the useful moves.
Step 5: Reporting back
Your dashboard shows live ROI, currently open positions, and fee history, so at any point you can see exactly what the engine did and why your balance moved the way it did — no black box.
Where risk actually sits
None of this eliminates risk; it changes what kind of risk you're taking. You're not exposed to price direction, but you are exposed to funding-rate reversals and to the exchange itself holding your funds. If you haven't yet, What is Spot-Futures Arbitrage? covers that risk profile in more depth.
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