MEV AND THE LIMITS OF SCALING

Summary from the TLDR Crypto newsletter

MEV spam bots now consume over 50% of gas on major L2s like Base while paying under 10% of fees, effectively nullifying scaling gains and raising costs for real users. These bots flood chains with gas-intensive transactions that rarely execute trades, wasting compute simply to read prices and compete for MEV opportunities due to private mempools and lack of efficient bidding. The solution proposed is programmable privacy and explicit MEV auctions (via TEEs), enabling bots to backrun securely without spam and restoring blockspace for actual economic activity.