Ethereum bots are burning over 50% of gas fees so ETH strangely needs privacy tech to fix it at scale $ETH #Ethereum
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On some Ethereum L2s, bots now burn over half the gas just searching for MEV, and they don’t pay proportionally for it. That’s a scaling and market-fairness problem rooted in market structure.
The privacy conversation in crypto has finally escaped the “anonymous money” framing that dominated the last cycle. In early 2026, the urgency is economic and rooted in immediate financial realities.
The industry faces a structural problem: on-chain transparency generates extractable value at massive scale, and that extraction has grown into a scaling bottleneck rather than remaining a purely philosophical concern.
Flashbots has documented how MEV-related “search spam” can consume more than 50% of gas on major layer 2s while paying a small share of fees. Alchemy, citing EigenPhi data, points to nearly $24 million in MEV profit extracted on Ethereum over just 30 days, from Dec. 8, 2025, to Jan. 6, 2026.
When a hedge fund's $10 million DEX swap is visible in the mempool before it lands, slippage from sandwich attacks can dwarf gas costs.
Privacy is no longer a feature request. It's a market fairness problem.
Reads, writes, proving
The Ethereum Foundation's Privacy and Scaling Explorations team has standardized a three-part framework: private writes, private reads, and private proving.
Private reads relate to hiding transaction intent before execution. Private reads hide which users and apps are querying, such as balances and positions. Private proving is about making zero-knowledge proofs and attestations cheap and portable enough to embed everywhere.
Cais Manai, co-founder and CPO of TEN Protocol, argues the most urgent problem is reads. He stated that the industry has spent years obsessing over hiding who sent what to whom, the ‘write' side of privacy.
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