In this article from The Defiant, Erick Watson is quoted on the growing problem of maximal extractable value (MEV) and its impact on blockchain scalability. A June 2025 report by Flashbots argued that spam bots are consuming most of the capacity of high-throughput blockchains through “spectacularly wasteful onchain searching.”
Watson explains how Randamu’s threshold cryptographic infrastructure complements the solutions proposed by Flashbots: “While Flashbots’ two-pronged approach is sound, integrating threshold cryptographic infrastructure adds a critical enforcement layer to programmable privacy and auction fairness, helping mitigate spam and reduce structural inefficiencies that undermine scalability.”
He further describes how threshold cryptography can enforce temporal access control at the protocol level, regulating who can see transaction data, when they can access it, and how often, providing a mechanism that “scales better than gas fees alone.” This perspective positions Randamu’s technology as a complementary layer to Flashbots’ proposed solutions of programmable privacy and explicit bidding systems.
Key Takeaways
- MEV spam bots are consuming the majority of blockspace on high-throughput chains
- Flashbots proposes replacing gas-based bidding with programmable privacy
- Threshold cryptography adds protocol-level enforcement for privacy and auction fairness
- Temporal access control offers a scalable alternative to gas-based MEV mitigation