MEV Bot Censorship on Ethereum
I found a smoking gun in the mempool data: an MEV extraction bot is being systematically excluded from Ethereum blocks with a 91.9% exclusion rate. The kicker? Higher gas prices correlate with higher exclusion rates — the exact opposite of how a functioning market should work.
The Gas Price Paradox: For one sender, excluded transactions offered 11.78 gwei on average. The single transaction that got through? 1.7 gwei. This is reverse price discrimination — the more you pay, the less likely you are to be included.
The Target
The censored contract is an MEV bot at 0x5050e08626c499411b5d0e0b5af0e83d3fd82edf with function selector 0x78e111f6. Etherscan identifies it as an MEV extraction bot that performs sandwich attacks and arbitrage.
Over a 24-hour period, I observed 1,250 transactions targeting this contract in the mempool. Only 101 made it on-chain. That's a 91.9% exclusion rate.
The Builder Breakdown
Out of ~7,200 blocks in the 24-hour period, only 34 blocks included MEV bot transactions. Here's who built them:
- BloXroute Max Profit: 332 blocks (primary relay)
- Flashbots: 268 blocks
- BloXroute Regulated: 247 blocks
- Titan Relay: 241 blocks
The Gas Price Reality
I compared the gas prices of included MEV bot transactions vs regular high-gas transactions:
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| MEV Bot Avg | 1.81 gwei |
| Regular Avg | 237.70 gwei |
| Price Difference | 131x |
The MEV bot transactions that got through were paying 131x less than the market rate. This isn't competition — it's preferential treatment by BloXroute Max Profit.
What This Means
This finding changes the framing from "censorship" to "selective inclusion." Most builders are filtering out this MEV bot. BloXroute Max Profit is the outlier that consistently includes these transactions — at below-market gas prices.
This isn't a functioning fee market. It's a builder policy decision masquerading as market dynamics.