Flashbots called MEV bots a blockchain scalability problem.

Flashbots has published a study according to which MEV bots have become a systemic threat to blockchain scaling. Their spam is not an accident – it is the result of a critical flaw in the structure of the market.

High-performance networks such as Base, OP Mainnet, and Solana are increasingly witnessing transactions that do not add value but burn blockchain space and computational resources.

The reason for this is an architectural feature: to lock in a profitable MEV opportunity, searchers are forced to send transactions blindly - within the same block where the arbitrage arises.

In private mempools, like those of Base and Solana, they do not see the current user transactions, so the only way to gain an advantage is to “attack” blocks with hundreds of speculative operations.

This phenomenon is intensified by four key factors:

Flashbots called it a spam auction — an inefficient market form that stimulates network congestion and poorly monetizes MEV.

For example, on Base in February 2025, 56% of the gas, 26% of the available data on Ethereum L1, and 14% of the fees came from spam created by MEV bots. This raises minimum transaction rates for ordinary users, makes hardware requirements for nodes higher, and consumes resources that could be used by applications.

At the same time, Flashbots proposed a radical change — instead of a gas auction, it would introduce programmable privacy and specialized MEV auctions, where search engines could submit private off-chain bids with a guarantee of execution order, but without the ability to frontrunning. This could drastically reduce spam, restore scaling efficiency, and reduce fees.

Recall that due to the transaction using the MEV bot, the fee was 46.07 ETH.