New Report in Title Limitations of MEV and scalingexplores the vast amount of MEV spam that offsets improvements in blockchain throughput.
The impact of additional traffic includes high fees for users of the popular Ethereum “Layer-to-” (L2) scaling network.
Similar trends in Solana and other L2s made the Flashbots do their own deep dives into rollups built through the OP stack (optimism, bass, unicane, world). The findings show how spam transactions make up a significant portion of the block space available during payments Disproportionately lower fees To do so.
Read more: DEFI trader hit on MEV attack traded 440K USDC for just 10k USDT
Maximum extractable value (MEV) is a practice that involves scanning the “Mempool” of pending transactions to insert profitable transactions according to the actions of other users.
Front running, back running and sandwich attacks are all common MEV tactics. This process tends to be highly specialized and leads to the world of dog dogs fighting for peak efficiency and corresponding rewards.
However, there are no official members in the rollups like the ones we investigated. Instead, the high-throughput, low-paying environment allows bots to take a dragnet approach and submit transactions that read prices across multiple on-chain exchanges.
If a profitable price discrepancy is found, they will receive a ruling. Otherwise, the transaction will be aborted.
The highly competitive winner landscape of MEV means there is a significant concentration of activity. Two searchers responsible for more than 80% of the base spam are responsiblefor example.
Miller highlights one successful example of base from the bot. With about one hit rate on 350 attempts, $0.02 is spent on gas fees to earn just $0.12.
“The true cost of this one successful arbitration is shocking,” he writes, revealing that about 132 million gas was spent per single successful arbitrage, equivalent to about four complete Ethereum blocks.
“Remember,” he adds. “This was one of several things competing for this opportunity, so the true cost of the chain is even higher.”
All of this spam has multiple effects. In addition to consuming up to 60% of the available block space, the report also includes: MEV Bots pay less than 10% of the total fee. The extra traffic that clogs the network also serves as a “permanent and artificially high baseline of transaction fees” for regular users.
In addition to consuming up to 60% of the available block space, MEV bots pay less than 10% of the total fee.
Such inefficient use of available block space leads to a significant delay in “effective gas throughput,” a metric calculated by the flashbot as “gas process per second after subtracting the gas used in the spam bot.”
The delay between effective throughput and improvements in Total throughput is clear, with MEV searchers spam transactions capturing the difference.
The proposed solution in the report is focused on ensuring searchers have access to a (currently private) pool of pending transactions.
This allows for targeted, and perhaps more profitable operations. Not a spam-based approach.
However, it emphasizes that there should be “limits to the way (bots) use that information” to avoid predatory MEV activity.
Miller says, “The conversation about scaling is too narrow. We know more and more how to build raw technical throughput. The new frontier is economic.” A full report is available on the Flashbots blog.
MEV searcher spam transactions capture the difference between effective and total throughput.
However, it’s not all spam
MEV bots are often seen in bad light, but it’s not all spam or sandwiches.
Multiple hacks on the Decentralized Financial (DEFI) platform have been featured as profitable transactions by bots and frontons, resulting profits end with bots rather than the original hackers.
In many cases, revenue is returned by the bot owner.
Just this morning, a $120,000 hack for Ethereum-based meta pool According to blockchain security company Quillaudits, it was Frontrun by MEV bots.
Read more: White Hat Hacker Rescue $1.5 million from the first debt hack of 2025
Also, “Sniper,” which first specialized in newly launched tokens today, was able to throw away one spark token for nearly $20,000 in USDT just 11 seconds after the platform’s airdrop was released.
According to CoinmarketCap, the SPK is currently trading for around $0.06. CoinMarketCap comes out as a cool profit of 3,333% for snipers.