The blockchain industry is facing a growing crisis of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), as they emerge as a dominant limiter for broader scalability. While many developers are working on the issue, the team at Flashbots has come up with a latest study and a potential fix.
In a latest report, Robert Miller, Product Lead at Flashbots, warns that on-chain bot activities are consuming vast resources while threatening the efficiency of high-throughput blockchain networks like Solana and Ethereum Layer-2 (L2) networks.
“At a time when leading networks like Ethereum, its L2s, and Solana are racing to scale as fast as possible, the economic limits imposed by MEV are becoming apparent across the industry,” Miller said, adding, “Spectacularly wasteful on-chain searching is starting to consume most of the capacity of most high-throughput blockchains.”
Miller finds a stark imbalance between normal and MEV transactions, revealing that 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 mirrors trends observed on Solana, where bots occupy 40% of blockspace but pay only 7% of fees.
The report cites 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 not sounding alarming for end-users, the economic toll for such a state is significant. Flashbots found 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 arises 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 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.
“Flashbots has been experimenting with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to give searchers visibility without the ability to sandwich,” Miller emphasizes. “TEEs give 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.
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