MEV Spam Wastes Solana and Ethereum L2 Capacity, Raises Fees

A new Flashbots report reveals that Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) searchers are flooding high-throughput networks like Solana and Ethereum Layer-2 rollups with speculative “spam auctions,” consuming blockspace and negating recent scaling gains. On Solana, arbitrage bots occupy 40% of blockspace while contributing only 7% of fees. On L2s such as Base and Optimism, bots use over half of available gas but pay minimal transaction costs. Failed probe transactions can burn up to 132 million gas—equivalent to four Ethereum blocks—per successful arbitrage. Flashbots researchers argue that this MEV-induced waste has become the primary bottleneck to blockchain scaling and propose solutions combining programmable privacy, explicit fee bidding, and trusted execution environments (TEEs) to shift competition from spam to transparent, price-based auctions. Experiments, including zero-knowledge dark pools and Chainlink’s Smart Value Recapture (SVR), aim to reclaim non-toxic MEV and lower user fees, potentially turning MEV into a sustainable revenue source rather than a drain on performance.