I just read this article by FlashBots. Cool analysis But I believe they overstate their central thesis: that all excess blockspace will be filled with MEV-induced spam, and this will in turn raise fees for regular users, pricing them out. It looks more to me like scaling does work, this is only a problem on chains with a ton of economic value, and the use-cases they describe as being priced out would easily trigger the scaling limits themselves. I'm just posting some thoughts I had here - it's not a takedown, and I don't even have skin in the game, but I think the mental model they present is unnecessarily alarmist & wanted to clarify for whoever's interested. The key thing is that the amount of demand for spam is a function of the MEV of the network: how much _money_ there is up for grabs with brute-force searches. Their thesis goes something like this: 1. MEV searchers will fill all unused blockspace to perform atomic searches for swaps. 2. These search transactions will bid the price per transaction up 3. This is the real limit on scaling blockchains: no matter how much space you add, the remainder will always be filled by junk, and this will make fees prohibitively expensive for end users. I am with them up to point 3. This is for a couple reasons. First: MEV searchers in the aggregate won't spend much more on on-chain searching than they manage to extract as a reward. Second: The total amount that is spent on on-chain searching is spread out over _all_ searching transactions. Therefore increasing the blockspace capacity of the network, while holding MEV constant, will still reduce transaction fees proportionately. So it doesn't look to me like the central thesis holds: if you increase the capacity of the network, all else equal, you still get correspondingly lower fees for users. And I believe that, at least in the current environment, that technological scaling can still outstrip the extractable value side of the equation. Note that fees in a blockspace market are effectively zero until the whole block is being used. Is there room for improvement? Absolutely. The kind of dumb searching Bert describes is definitely wasteful. Is this inefficient for users? Not if fees for the operations they want to perform are cheap enough. In an extreme example, if there's $1 million per second up for grabs in MEV (that is, if on-chain brute force MEV were a $31.5 Trillion industry annually), with 20,000 TPS total, the marginal demand per transaction would be pushed up to a floor price of $50/tx. But with clear scaling routes to much higher TPS, and with real MEV quite a few orders of magnitude lower, the real effect on a chain with 40k TPS and a "modest" $10B/yr ($317/s) amount of available MEV would be a transaction floor price of about $0.01. I believe that a chain with $10B/yr up for grabs on brute-force MEV would have to have a lot of demand overall. Especially because a lot of MEV isn't even captured by these kinds of dumb brute-force approaches. Picking the low-hanging fruit of brute-force MEV would already get you to a tiny fraction of a cent of user impact. I'll concede here that this probably would price out a lot of logic for things like micropayments and social networks. Though the implied blockspace demand for apps like this at scale would probably already outstrip 40k TPS and start driving the price up independently. In either case, I think the solution is to use a rollup or separate system that doesn't have the same amount of MEV at stake so there's less incentive for spam. So it's clear that MEV will have some influence on scaled chains, but this doesn't seem nearly as dire as presented. The interventions that FlashBots propose will of course help. Anything that reduces the "MEV available to dumb atomic searching" will.