To Wait or To Probe: Arbitrage Competition on High-Throughput Blockchains
For blockchain protocol designers and MEV researchers, this work provides empirical evidence and a model linking search architecture to spam and fee revenue, with concrete policy implications.
The paper models competition between targeted and probabilistic search for MEV on high-throughput blockchains, showing that probabilistic search accounts for 23% of arbitrage activity but produces 95% of spam and consumes 20% of gas on Base. After configuration changes, protocol fee revenue shifts toward successful arbitrages and away from spam.
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) on high-throughput blockchains can be captured through targeted search, where bots identify opportunities off-chain and submit route-committed transactions, or through probabilistic search, where bots submit repeated attempts that resolve opportunity discovery during on-chain execution. This distinction has direct implications for spam, blockspace consumption, and protocol fee revenue. We model how ordering granularity, fee floors, and opportunity-access shocks shape competition between these architectures. Using cyclic arbitrage data on Base from June 2025 to February 2026, we develop a trace-level classifier for search architectures and show that the resulting labels correspond to distinct execution behavior. We test the model across three episodes: Flashblocks selects against broad on-chain probabilistic scanners; token-launch opportunity shocks temporarily revive probabilistic search; and higher fee floors select against probabilistic bots whose opportunity flow cannot sustain repeated attempts. In our sample, probabilistic search accounts for only 23% of arbitrage activity but produces 95% of spam and consumes 20% of Base gas. After Base's configuration changes, protocol fee revenue shifts toward successful arbitrages and away from spam, probabilistic bots pay higher priority fees, and spam consumes a smaller share of blockspace.