Maximal extractable worth (MEV) is now the ‘dominant limit to scaling blockchains’ in line with the analysis group.
Maximal extractable worth, or MEV, has turn into an issue so extreme that it’s limiting the power of main blockchains to scale, in line with analysis group Flashbots.
MEV refers back to the most revenue that validators can extract by together with, excluding, or reordering transactions inside a block.
A June 16 report by Flashbots’ steward, Robert Miller, argued that spambots are taking on a lot blockspace that “at a time when leading networks like Ethereum, its [Layer 2s], and Solana are racing to scale as fast as possible… spectacularly wasteful onchain searching is starting to consume most of the capacity of most high throughput blockchains.”
The result’s “chains congested with spam and fees elevated by that spam.”
That’s as a result of spambots are economically rational, with MEV incentivizing them to devour any new blockspace that turns into obtainable or is added.
On the Optimism mainnet, spam bots used about 57% of the gasoline however paid lower than 10% of the charges, he famous.
It’s significantly problematic on Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer 2 community.
Between November 2024 and February 2025, “Base added 11M in [gas per second] throughput and almost all of it was consumed by spam bots,” Miller mentioned. That’s equal to 3 Ethereum Mainnets value of capability, he added.
“The conversation around scaling has been narrowly focused on raw technical throughput for too long,” Miller concluded. “Our findings show that the critical frontier is no longer making blocks bigger. It is using blockspace more efficiently.”
MEV Auctions
Miller mentioned that Flashbots sees a two-part answer: changing gas-based bidding with programmable privateness and specific bidding.
Programmable privateness would enable MEV bot operators “real-time access to the transaction flow, while programmatically enforcing restrictions on how they can use that information,” he mentioned. “The system needs to be able to verifiably guarantee that a searcher can only backrun transactions and can’t frontrun, sandwich, or leak private data.”
The second half is to permit MEV searchers “to explicitly bid for transaction inclusion and ordering in an auction… [submitting] a direct, monetary bid for the specific ordering right they are interested in.”
Flashbots has been experimenting with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to present MEV bot operators visibility with out giving them the power to sandwich.
One other answer: Remove MEV
MEV “makes DeFi financially less efficient, opens the door wide for malicious actors, puts users at risk of harm, and makes DeFi unpredictable for users,” mentioned Jan Camenisch, CTO on the DFINITY Basis, a serious contributor to the Web Laptop blockchain (ICP), through e mail.
“It also causes a misalignment of miners, who were supposed to offer a service (decentralized secure compute) and now pervert the chain into a money extraction mechanism—very contradictory to the original goal,” he added.
ICP’s answer is on-chain encryption, which it lately enabled, Camenisch mentioned. It permits customers to ship encrypted messages on to sensible contracts. This has direct implications for fixing MEV: by encrypting trades, customers can stop miners or blockmakers from accessing transaction particulars, eliminating the chance to insert MEV transactions.
Hurt Discount
Michael Repetný, co-founder and CEO of Marinade Labs, was not shocked to see spam bots taking on a lot blockspace.
“That’s already the norm in traditional financial markets, where much of the trading is automated,” he advised The Defiant through e mail. “The difference on-chain is that blockspace is limited and highly visible, so when bots and MEV strategies consume large portions of it, regular users feel the impact more directly through higher fees and slower transaction times.”
He argued that the aim shouldn’t be eliminating bots, however slightly constructing methods that decrease the injury they trigger.
“On Solana, that means expanding bandwidth and lowering latency so the network can handle much higher volumes of transactions without being as vulnerable to manipulation through transaction ordering,” Repetný mentioned. “There’s also promising research into approaches like allowing multiple validators to propose blocks simultaneously, which can reduce the power any single validator has over ordering and create a more competitive environment that benefits users.”
Threshold Encryption
“While Flashbots’ two-pronged approach is sound, integrating threshold cryptographic infrastructure adds a critical enforcement layer to programmable privacy and auction fairness, helping mitigate spam and reduce structural inefficiencies that undermine scalability,” mentioned Erick Watson, co-founder and CEO of Randamu, in an e mail to The Defiant.
It may possibly implement constraints on the protocol stage on who can see what, after they can see it and the way typically they will see it, Watson mentioned.
“This enforces a sort of temporal access control that scales better than gas fees alone,” he mentioned.
Threshold encryption would offer front-running safety with out the necessity for TEEs, mentioned Luis Bezzenberger, head of product at Shutter Community, in an e mail.
“Privacy-based solutions like an encrypted mempool offer a better path forward… allowing rollups to safely open up their mempools or preventing front-running,” he mentioned.
