Today, we introduce a new thesis: MEV has become the dominant limit to scaling blockchains. Spectacularly wasteful onchain searching is starting to consume most of the capacity of most high-throughput blockchains. This is a market failure we can no longer ignore.

It’s also visible across the Ethereum L2 ecosystem, as we show below and others have recently found as well:

To investigate, we did a deep-dive on OP-Stack rollups. Our findings serve as a window into an industry-wide problem. Spam bots consume huge portions of gas across top rollups, while paying disproportionately low fees

In the worst case, spam neutralizes scaling altogether From Nov '24 to Feb '25, Base added 11M in gas/s throughput. Three Ethereum Mainnets worth of capacity! It was all consumed by spam bots.

Why? In short, searchers are forced to implement and execute their bots onchain because they have no visibility into private mempools. With cheep fees, expressive transactions, and no way to bid for transaction ordering competition for MEV devolves into a “spam auction.”

The true cost of this dynamic is staggering. A single 2 hop Uni v3 arb can take as little as ~200k gas, but we found that the top spam bot on Base consumed on average ~132 million gas in failed attempts for every single successful arb. That’s nearly 4 full Ethereum blocks!

The path forward is to correct the market failures that lead to spam, not only adding gas. A solution needs: - Programmable privacy to allow searchers visibility while preventing sandwiching - Explicit bidding to provide an efficient way to express tx ordering preferences

These components work together: - Programmable privacy eliminates the need to write to the chain to read the latest state, without exposing users to frontrunning. - Explicit bidding creates an efficient, priced-based auction to capture the value this visibility reveals.

We have been experimenting with TEEs to allow searchers to backrun private transactions, but programmatically restrict them from sandwiching or exporting private data. We're excited to bring this to L2s with a next-generation MEV auction!

The conversation on scaling has been too narrow. We increasingly know how to build raw technical throughput; the new frontier is economic. To break through the limits imposed by MEV, we must replace wasteful spam auctions with expressive, fair, and efficient markets.

For chains, this means capturing more revenue in an efficient, spam-free, sandwich-free market. For users and builders, the full benefits of scaling are finally realized through lower, stable fees and genuine capacity.

There's a lot more I couldn't preview here on Twitter. Read the full article here:

Please get in touch if you're interested in collaborating! And if you want to work on frontier technical products, we're always looking for engineering talent too.

Thank you to the many many collaborators and reviewers: @Data_Always @hasufl @0xOptimus @sui414 @DistributedMarz @christine_dkim @Freddmannen @NathanWorsley_ @gakonst @danrobinson @buffalu__ @0xQuintus @defin00b @AnikaRaghu @brianisbland, @xin__wan, @sammcingvale, Eli, @ralexstokes.

@Data_Always @hasufl @0xOptimus @sui414 @DistributedMarz @christine_dkim @Freddmannen @NathanWorsley_ @gakonst @danrobinson @buffalu__ @0xQuintus @defin00b @AnikaRaghu @brianisbland @xin__wan @sammcingvale @phildaian And to @achalvs for the great design work :)