A brand new report, titled MEV and the Limits of Scaling, explores the huge quantity of MEV spam offsetting enhancements in blockchain throughput.
Results of the additional visitors embody increased charges for customers of in style Ethereum “layer-two” (L2) scaling networks.
Comparable developments on Solana and different L2s led Flashbots to do their very own deep dive into rollups constructed through the OP Stack (Optimism, Base, Unichain, and World). The findings present how spam transactions take up a good portion of obtainable blockspace while paying disproportionately decrease charges for doing so.
Immediately, we introduce a brand new thesis: MEV has grow to be the dominant restrict to scaling blockchains.
Spectacularly wasteful onchain looking out is beginning to eat a lot of the capability of most high-throughput blockchains.
It is a market failure we are able to not ignore. pic.twitter.com/c92S3Sjznh
— @bertcmiller ⚡️🤖 (@bertcmiller) June 16, 2025
Maximal extractable worth (MEV) is a observe that historically includes scanning the “mempool” of pending transactions to insert a worthwhile commerce based on the actions of different customers.
Frontrunning, backrunning, and sandwich assaults are all frequent MEV ways. The method tends to be extremely specialised, resulting in a dog-eat-dog world of bots battling for peak effectivity and the corresponding rewards.
Nonetheless, on rollups resembling these studied, there is no such thing as a public mempool. The high-throughput, low-fee atmosphere as an alternative permits bots to take a dragnet strategy, submitting transactions that learn costs throughout a number of on-chain exchanges.
If a worthwhile worth discrepancy is discovered, they take the arbitrage. If not, the transaction is aborted.
The extremely aggressive winner-takes-all panorama of MEV signifies that the exercise is closely concentrated, with simply two searchers being accountable for over 80% of the spam on Base, for instance.
Miller highlights one profitable instance on Base from a bot with successful price of roughly one in 350 makes an attempt, during which $0.02 are spent in fuel charges to revenue simply $0.12.
“The true cost of this one successful arbitrage is shocking”, he writes, revealing that roughly 132 million fuel was spent per single profitable arbitrage — equal to just about 4 full Ethereum blocks.
“Keep in mind,” he provides, “this was one among several that were competing for this opportunity, so the true cost to the chain is even higher still.”
The results of all this spam are a number of. The report finds that, along with consuming as much as 60% of obtainable blockspace, MEV bots pay lower than 10% of complete charges. The additional visitors clogging up the community additionally leads to a “persistent, artificially high baseline for transaction fees” for normal customers.
In addition to consuming as much as 60% of obtainable blockspace, MEV bots pay lower than 10% of complete charges.
Such inefficient use of the out there blockspace results in a big lag in “effective gas throughput,” a metric that Flashbots have calculated as “the gas per second a rollup processes after deducting the gas used by spam bots.”
The lag between efficient throughput and enhancements to complete throughput is evident, with MEV searchers’ spam transactions capturing the distinction.
The report’s proposed options centre round permitting searchers to entry the (presently non-public) pool of pending transactions, and a extra environment friendly auctioning course of for having their MEV transactions included in a block.
This may enable for focused, and sure extra worthwhile, operation, somewhat than a spam-based strategy.
Nonetheless, it stresses that there needs to be “restrictions on how [the bots] can use that information” to keep away from predatory MEV exercise.
Miller indicators off with “the conversation on scaling has been too narrow. We increasingly know how to build raw technical throughput; the new frontier is economic.” The total report is on the market on the Flashbots weblog.
MEV searchers’ spam transactions seize the distinction between efficient and complete throughput.
It’s not all spam, although
Whereas MEV bots are sometimes seen in a nasty mild, it’s not all spam and sandwiches.
A number of tried hacks of decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms have been picked up as worthwhile transactions by bots and frontrun, with the ensuing income ending up with the bot somewhat than the unique hacker.
In lots of instances, the proceeds are returned by the bot’s proprietor, who might or might not take a bounty.
Simply this morning, a $120,000 hack of Ethereum-based Meta Pool was frontrun by an MEV bot, based on blockchain safety agency QuillAudits.
— QuillAudits | Web3 Safety 🥷 (@QuillAudits_AI) June 17, 2025
Additionally right this moment, a “sniper” specializing in being first to newly launched tokens managed to dump a single Spark token for practically $20,000 of USDT simply 11 seconds after the platform’s airdrop went reside.
SPK is presently buying and selling at round $0.06, based on CoinMarketCap, which comes out as a cool 3,333% revenue for the sniper.
