MEV Bots, Blockspace Waste, and Transaction-Ordering Mitigations

Summary

The document describes maximal extractable value as profit gained by changing transaction order, insertion, or censorship. It focuses on bots that front-run, back-run, or sandwich trades, arguing that their speculative transactions consume blockspace and can raise costs for ordinary users. It cites Base as an example, claiming bots use over half of gas while contributing under a tenth of transaction fees, and says a small number of entities account for much of the waste on some networks.

The article argues that adding network capacity may not improve user experience if bots absorb it, and that validator incentives to favor profitable MEV can distort transaction inclusion. Proposed mitigations include trusted execution environments that restrict access to pending transaction data, explicit auctions for ordering or inclusion, and encrypted mempools or threshold encryption. These approaches aim to reduce harmful extraction and gas competition while retaining some MEV benefits. The piece presents these as proposals, without comparative performance evidence, implementation details, or analysis of their tradeoffs for privacy, security, and decentralization.

Key ideas

• MEV arises when block producers or searchers profit by reordering, inserting, or censoring transactions.
• Bot activity can consume scarce blockspace through failed or low-value speculative transactions.
• The article claims MEV activity can offset throughput gains and increase costs for regular users.
• Trusted execution environments, structured bidding, and encrypted transaction data are proposed as mitigations.
• The document offers no comparative evidence that establishes which mitigation performs best.

Tags

This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.