MEV bots are clogging blockchains faster than networks can scale, says Flashbots

Maximal extractable value, or MEV, has “become the dominant limit to scaling blockchains,” research group Flashbots warned in a new report released Monday. The paper argues that spam transactions generated by MEV bots are soaking up blockspace faster than networks can add it, nullifying recent breakthroughs in raw throughput.

MEV is the maximum profit that validators can earn by reordering, inserting, or excluding transactions in a block before it is finalized.

Flashbots found that spam bots routinely consume more than 50% of gas on leading OP-Stack rollups while paying under 10% of total fees, pushing baseline transaction costs higher for everyday users. “Bots often send hundreds of transactions for a single low-margin arbitrage. While profitable for the bots, it’s wasteful for the network, burdening nodes and users,” the group wrote.

The issue is particularly concentrated on networks like Coinbase’s Base network, where two bots account for over 80% of spam transactions, the study said.

“Between November 2024 and February 2025, Base added 11M in gas/s throughput, and almost all of it was consumed by spam bots,” Flashbots wrote. That equates to three Ethereum Mainnets worth of capacity, according to the report.

The problem also extends beyond Ethereum’s Layer 2 ecosystem. On Solana, MEV bots now occupy about 40 % of blockspace, the researchers added. The group said the data indicates how economic congestion, not technical bandwidth, is capping real-world scalability.

Indeed, Flashbots blames today’s “spam auction” market structure, where bots flood blocks with speculative arbitrage transactions because private mempools hide pending order flow. While technical upgrades like database sharding stem the problem, they are ineffective alone, the report said.

Proposed fix

To address the MEV-driven bottleneck, Flashbots proposed replacing gas-based bidding with a two-part design. The potential fix would grant searchers, or MEV bots operators, programmable privacy and allow them to submit explicit, off-chain bids for transaction ordering in a dedicated auction. Trusted-execution environments would reveal user flows without allowing frontrunning, while the auction channels value back to validators and users.

If adopted, Flashbots argues that the overhaul could free up most of today’s congested capacity, lower fees, and restore headroom for new applications.