Flashbots: MEV Bots Clog Blockchain Speed Faster Than Network Expansion

According to The Block, research firm Flashbots released a report warning that MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) has become a major bottleneck for blockchain scalability. The report indicates that MEV bots are generating spam transactions that are consuming block space at a rate faster than network expansion, causing the original breakthrough in throughput technology to fail.

The study found that spam bots on the mainstream OP-Stack Rollup consume over 50% of the Gas fees but only pay less than 10% of the transaction fees, thereby driving up the base transaction costs for ordinary users. Among them, Coinbase's Base network is the most severe, with two bots contributing over 80% of the spam transactions.

This issue also exists in networks like Solana, where MEV bots occupy about 40% of the block space. The report believes that economic congestion (rather than technical bandwidth) has become the actual bottleneck for expansion. The existing "spam transaction auction" market structure exacerbates this issue. Flashbots proposes reforming the existing bidding mechanism to adopt an off-chain auction scheme to reduce network congestion and lower fees.