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

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24172v1
• Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2026 08:54:55 GMT
• Title: There Will Be Spam: Characterizing State-Invariant Transactions and Speculative MEV
• Abstract summary: We introduce state-invariant transactions, defined as transactions whose inclusion or removal does not affect the resulting blockchain state beyond transaction fees.<n>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.<n>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.
• Score: 3.0688811992919027
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• 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.

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