MEV and the Limits of Scaling

MEV has become the dominant limit to scaling blockchains

Yesterday I published my first piece of writing on MEV in awhile. The thesis is that MEV has become the dominant limit to scaling blockchains. It’s a provocative thesis, and we’ve got a lot of interesting and novel data to back it up:

• Spam bots across multiple rollups are consuming more than 50% of gas and paying less than 10% of fees.

• Between November 2024 to February 2025 Base added 11M in gas/s throughput and almost all of it was consumed by spam bots. (Three Ethereum Mainnets worth of capacity!)

• Spam bots’ constant demand for gas creates persistently higher fees for users.

• The market for spam is extremely concentrated with two searchers responsible for more than 80% of spam on Base.

This isn’t an isolated issue either. Spam bots on Solana use 40% of blockspace and only pay 7% of fees.

There’s a lot more on the problem, data, and solution in the article. You can check it out on the Flashbots Writing page here.