MEV AND THE LIMITS OF SCALING

Summary from the TLDR Crypto newsletter

MEV-driven spam has become the dominant bottleneck for blockchain scaling, with spam bots consuming over 50% of gas on major rollups like Base while paying less than 10% of fees, effectively neutralizing 11M gas/s of new capacity added between November 2024 and February 2025. The root cause is a market structure flaw: without visibility into private mempools, searchers must blindly spam blocks with speculative transactions to capture MEV, with successful arbitrages requiring ~350 failed attempts consuming 132 million gas or 4 Ethereum blocks. This could be solved through programmable privacy using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) that allow searchers to see transaction flow for backrunning while preventing frontrunning, combined with explicit bidding mechanisms to replace the current wasteful "spam auction" with efficient price discovery.