A new report in Flashbots warns that the Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) is quietly becoming one of the biggest obstacles to blockchain scaling.
Research shows that MEV searcher-powered ramp-stretched “spam auctions” systematically consume most of the new capacity of high-throughput chains, such as Solana and Ethereum Layer 2 (L2), neutralizing increased scaling and boosting user fees.
MEV-induced waste scale
MEVs are long-standingly controversial, where extra profit miners or bots can extract by sorting transactions. However, Flashbots’ latest Deep Dive shows that this issue has escalated from an ethical debate to a measurable drug of blockchain performance.
Analysed data from OP stack rollups such as Base and Optimism Mainnet, along with Solana’s findings, Flashbots’ survey showed how arbitragebots of frequencies with countless speculative transactions in search of rapid profits flooded the flood network.
Researcher Bert Miller said Solana’s bots donate just 7% of their total fees, while using about 40% of their block space. Meanwhile, with Ethereum L2s like the Base and OP Mainnet, spam bots eat up more than half of the available gas, but pay a small portion of the cost compared to legitimate users.
Miller shared one Stark example in X between November 2024 and February 2025. The base increased throughput by 11 million gas per second, roughly the same as the three Ethereum mainnets to see almost everything absorbed by the spambot.
He emphasized that the core issue lies in the behavior of the bot. Typically, a private memo pool designed to protect users from frontrunning blinds MEV searchers to real-time order flows. Therefore, to stay competitive, these bots tend to deploy complex transactions in chains to deploy arbitrage probes, resulting in a mountain of wasted calculations when profits are not present.
Miller pointed out that one successful two hop arbitrage could cost as many as 132 million times in a failed attempt.
According to him, this dynamic means that while blockchain can technically scale throughput, MEV spam creates economic ceilings that are inefficient and costly for everyone else to make raw lamps. The Flashbot paper called this “the dominant limitation of blockchain scaling,” suggesting that it overhauls the way networks handle transaction ordering.
The road to economic efficiency
The proposed revisions of the research institute combine “programmable privacy.” This will allow searchers to avoid spam, protect users from looting strategies, and explicitly bid on transaction priorities. This sees competition moves from brute force spam to transparent price-based auctions.
In another X-post, Miller revealed that some early experiments were already live, including using a reliable execution environment (TEE) to carry out the bot’s behavior. Last year, his compatriot Angela Lu announced that Flashbots had run tests and embedded the bot inside a safe enclave there.
Most recently, former Vinance CEO Changpeng Zhao has used zero knowledge proof to fly the idea of a dark pool to counter the MEV threat in the distributed financial (DEFI) space. Additionally, last year, Blockchain Oracle Provider ChainLink introduced a solution called Smart Value Recapture (SVR), which allows Defi apps to play “non-toxic” MEVs.
If refined, such innovations will reduce the rates for everyday users if they can turn MEVs from hidden drains into a source of sustainable revenue for chains.
