Blockchain Scalability Threatened by 50% MEV Bot Activity

The blockchain industry is currently facing a significant challenge due to Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), which is emerging as a major obstacle to broader scalability. While many developers are actively working on solutions, the team at Flashbots has recently published a study and proposed a potential remedy.

In a recent report, Robert Miller, Product Lead at Flashbots, highlights that on-chain bot activities are consuming substantial resources, thereby threatening the efficiency of high-throughput blockchain networks such as Solana and Ethereum Layer-2 (L2) networks. Miller notes that as leading networks like Ethereum, its L2s, and Solana strive to scale rapidly, the economic constraints imposed by MEV are becoming more apparent across the industry. He points out that the wasteful on-chain searching conducted by bots is consuming most of the capacity of high-throughput blockchains.

Miller's findings reveal a significant imbalance between normal transactions and MEV transactions. MEV bots account for over 50% of gas fees on major OP-Stack rollups, such as Optimism, Base, Unichain, and World, while contributing less than 10% of transaction handling fees. This inefficiency is mirrored on Solana, where bots occupy 40% of blockspace but pay only 7% of fees. The report provides a specific example on Base, where an 11 million gas per second (gas/s) throughput increase between November 2024 and February 2025—equivalent to three Ethereum Mainnets—was entirely consumed by spam bots.

While the impact on end-users may not be immediately alarming, the economic toll is substantial. Flashbots discovered that a single successful arbitrage on Base required approximately 132 million gas in failed attempts, equivalent to nearly four full Ethereum blocks. This wasteful "spam auction" dynamic occurs as searchers, lacking visibility into private mempools, flood the network with transactions to compete for MEV opportunities, driving up costs for users.

To address this market failure, Flashbots proposes a dual-pronged solution. First, it advocates for programmable privacy using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), allowing searchers to backrun private transactions without enabling sandwich attacks or data leaks. This approach builds on a 2024 experiment with TDX, which trustlessly captured 440 bundles. Second, it calls for explicit bidding mechanisms to create efficient, price-based auctions for transaction ordering. This fix could potentially replace chaotic spam with structured markets.

Miller emphasizes that Flashbots has been experimenting with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to give searchers visibility without the ability to sandwich. TEEs provide guarantees that specific code is being executed with data that is kept confidential even from the machine’s operator. The developer also highlights that the implications of these solutions are profound. For blockchains, this could mean higher revenue through spam-free systems. For users and developers, it promises lower, stable fees and genuine capacity gains.