Blockspace Under Pressure: An Analysis of Spam MEV on High-Throughput Blockchains
Wenhao Wang, Aditya Saraf, Lioba Heimbach, Kushal Babel, Fan Zhang
On high-throughput, low-fee blockchains, a qualitatively new form of maximal extractable value (MEV), spam MEV, has emerged: searchers submit large volumes of speculative transactions, whose profitability is resolved only at execution time. On major rollups, it can consume more than half of block gas, even though only a small fraction of probes ultimately results in a trade. Despite growing awareness of this phenomenon, there is no principled framework for understanding how blockchain design parameters shape its prevalence and impact. We develop such a framework, modeling spam transactions competing for on-chain opportunities under a competitive equilibrium that drives their profits to zero, and deriving equilibrium spam volumes as a function of block capacity, minimum gas price, and the transaction fee mechanism. Empirical evidence from Base and Arbitrum is consistent with several predictions of the model: spam grew sharply as block capacity was scaled up and fell when minimum gas prices were introduced. Our analysis yields three main insights. First, spam is always costly: when block capacity is scarce, it displaces users and drives up gas prices; as block capacity grows, it increasingly consumes execution resources, raising network externality, i.e., the cost of provisioning and processing blocks. We show that spam takes an increasing share of each additional unit of block capacity, so capping it before all users are included creates a favorable trade-off: forgoing a small amount of user welfare eliminates disproportionate spam and externality. Second, we extend the analysis to approximate priority fee ordering and show that it can reduce spam by making earlier block positions more expensive, as spammers pay more to reach early block positions. Third, as user demand grows and blockspace is scaled accordingly, spam's share of block capacity plateaus rather than growing indefinitely.
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