Myth Buster #10: The Best MEV Bot Is a Jack-of-All-Trades
One Bot, One Transaction, Eight Liquidations, and Five Arbitrages.
🦄 Myth
Each MEV Bot Specializes in One Strategy.
Many users think MEV bots are like tools in a toolbox—one bot for sandwiches, another for arbitrage, and yet another for liquidation.
But this case shows how elite searchers operate differently.
They don’t specialize—they synthesize.
🧠 What Happened
During the Black Monday crash, searcher 0x0e49 fired a single, gas-optimized bundle with 13 internal trades: eight Aave liquidations triggered sharp price jolts, and 5 arbitrages immediately leveraged the distortions.
The result: one atomic “multi-strategy” pipeline that freed collateral, exploited the self-induced spreads, and settled before rivals could react
🔬Microstructure
The transaction contains 125 steps.
🧬 Key Steps Breakdown
We simplify the strategy shown in the chart.
Each number before the hyphen (e.g., 1, 2, 3) represents an independent trade that can be executed or reverted as a whole within a call trace set. The number after the hyphen (e.g., 5-1, 5-2) indicates a further breakdown into individual trades within the same call trace set.
The 13 internal trades are organized like a custom-built pipeline:
Liquidations kicked it off—freeing collateral from underwater positions
That price movement created arbitrage windows, which the bot immediately exploited
Multiple trades followed in triangular patterns, timed to follow shifts triggered by its own earlier actions
This wasn’t passive routing; it was real-time opportunity synthesis.
For example:
Trade 4: A liquidation causes a price change in the USDT/WETH pool
That shift opens two triangular arbitrage paths, using Uniswap
Trades 9 and 10: 0e49 executes both, capturing the spread before anyone else can react.
This type of chaining offers multiple competitive advantages:
Gas efficiency (shared calldata, optimized bundling)
Higher profit density per block
Reduced replication by competitors (execution order is hard to imitate)
Stronger bribery competitiveness in builder auctions.
And if any leg of the sequence fails?
0e49 mitigates with partial reverts—a controlled way to drop non-viable trades without losing the entire bundle.
🧑🤝🧑 Key Entities
0e49 is the most capable searcher bot on Ethereum. As of May 29, over 30 days, 0e49 has submitted:
30,174 arbitrages
4,083 sandwiches, out of 87,717
6 liquidations, out of 190
That’s about 10% of all MEV activity across these categories, by a single searcher.
And interestingly, 0e49 isn’t integrated with any one builder.
Our MEV acceptance data shows it spreads its bids across block builders almost perfectly in line with market share: no favoritism, no access advantage.
Its edge? Execution architecture, not inside lanes.
And it’s not the only one doing so.
⚠️ Your Takeaway
Elite MEV bots no longer specialize; they combine liquidations, arbitrage, and sequencing into a single, atomic bundle.
Read all MEV Myth Buster series here:
All the MEV Myth Busters You Can't Miss
Behind every transaction is a battle-tested supply chain of searchers, builders, and validators—an ecosystem that rewards speed, creativity, and, sometimes, downright audacity. In this MEV Myth Busters series, we’ll dissect the real transactions that shatter people's comforting stories about DeFi.
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