Flashbots analysts have expressed concern about the impact of MEV bots on blockchain scalability. According to their observations, these specialized programs systematically consume over 50% of the gas in networks, creating significant strain on infrastructure and slowing the development of blockchain projects.
This is reported by Business • Media
MEV Bots and Their Negative Impact on the Blockchain Ecosystem
In a recent study, Flashbots notes that MEV bots have become not only a tool for profit but also a factor of systemic threat. They generate spam transactions that add no value but occupy block space and consume the computational resources of networks such as Base, OP Mainnet, and Solana. As a result, networks face rising minimum transaction fees, increased hardware requirements for nodes, and reduced available resources for useful applications.
“We found that spam bots regularly consume over 50% of the gas but pay only 9–14% of the fees, demonstrating a sixfold gap between resource usage and payment,” the report states.
The root cause of this issue lies in the architectural feature of the market: searchers are forced to send blind transactions within a single block to take advantage of lucrative MEV opportunities (such as arbitrage). In private mempools, like those in Base and Solana, bots do not have access to current user transactions, which forces them to create hundreds of speculative attempts in hopes of gaining an advantage.
Key Factors and Proposed Solutions
Experts identify four main factors that exacerbate the problem:
- High expressiveness of transactions — MEV bots can create complex conditional programs capable of responding to market changes in real time.
- Private mempools — protect users from frontrunning but limit access to transaction queue information for searchers.
- Low gas prices — allow the initiation of thousands of inefficient transactions in hopes of rare profits.
- Lack of an effective auction — without a transparent mechanism for ordering transactions, bots simply increase gas consumption to “win” a spot in the block.
Flashbots defines this situation as a “spam auction,” which is an inefficient market model and encourages network overload with low MEV monetization. For example, in February 2025, spam transactions from MEV bots accounted for 56% of all gas used on the Base platform, 26% of available data on Ethereum L1, and 14% of fees, significantly impacting the cost and availability of regular transactions.
At the same time, the organization proposed reforming the current approach. Instead of the traditional gas auction, Flashbots recommends implementing programmable privacy and specialized MEV auctions. In such auctions, searchers could submit their bids privately off-chain, with guarantees of execution order and without the risk of frontrunning. This approach, according to experts, would significantly reduce the volume of spam, enhance the efficiency of blockchain scaling, and lower fees for users.
“This is not just a series of isolated failures, but a structural defect in the current model. The problem is systemic, large-scale, and requires new institutional solutions,” concluded Flashbots.
It was previously reported that the fee for a single transaction using an MEV bot reached 46.07 ETH.