There Will Be Spam: Characterizing State-Invariant Transactions and Speculative MEV

2026-07-27

AI Summary

This study addresses the prevalence of state-invariant transactions—those that do not alter the blockchain’s final state—which waste resources and undermine decentralization, particularly on Layer-2 networks. For the first time, such transactions are systematically identified as on-chain spam through large-scale on-chain data analysis, transaction replay validation, and MEV strategy classification across Ethereum, Optimism, and Base. The findings reveal that 24% of transactions on Optimism and 37% on Base are state-invariant, with speculative MEV accounting for 57%–68% of these. On Ethereum, address poisoning constitutes 53% of non-reverted transactions. Moreover, the research demonstrates that the profitability of speculative MEV is significantly overestimated and uncovers widespread malicious activity, challenging prevailing assumptions about the origins of on-chain spam.

Abstract

Blockchains rely on transparency and immutability to ensure trust, but these guarantees come at the cost of an ever-growing ledger that increasingly threatens decentralization by making it more expensive to store and maintain the full transaction history. In this work, we introduce state-invariant transactions, defined as transactions whose inclusion or removal does not affect the resulting blockchain state beyond transaction fees. We argue that these transactions constitute a form of on-chain spam because they consume execution, bandwidth, storage, and blockspace without contributing to the final ledger state. We present the first large-scale measurement of state-invariant transactions across Ethereum, Optimism, and Base, identifying nearly 1.4 billion such transactions. While only 2.6% of Ethereum transactions are state-invariant, they account for 24% of transactions on Optimism and 37% on Base, representing a significant source of unnecessary resource consumption on Layer-2 blockchains. We show that speculative Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) is the dominant source of state-invariant transactions on Optimism and Base, accounting for 57% and 68%, respectively, but is not the only source as previously assumed. Moreover, despite its popularity, speculative MEV is not the most profitable strategy once the costs of state-invariant transactions are considered. Beyond MEV, we identify substantial malicious activity, with address poisoning campaigns accounting for 53% of non-reverted state-invariant transactions on Ethereum. Our findings suggest that mitigating state-invariant transactions could substantially reduce blockchain resource consumption and transaction costs while limiting phishing campaigns and other forms of blockchain abuse.

Problem

• state-invariant transactions
• blockchain spam
• speculative MEV
• resource consumption
• address poisoning

Innovation

• state-invariant transactions
• speculative MEV
• blockchain spam
• Layer-2 resource consumption
• address poisoning