MEV and the Limits of Scaling

MEV has become the dominant limit to scaling blockchains, with onchain arbitrage searching consuming most of the capacity of high-throughput chains. On OP Mainnet, spam bots used about 57% of gas but paid only about 9% of fees. On Base, throughput grew by 11 Mgas/s between November 2024 and February 2025, and almost all of that new capacity was consumed by spam, with two searchers responsible for more than 80% of Base's spam.