MEV in Binance Builder

2026-02-17

AI Summary

This study investigates builder-dominated MEV arbitrage on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), which has led to severe centralization, reduced fairness, and heightened censorship risks due to the whitelist-based Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) mechanism, short block intervals, and private order flow. By analyzing on-chain data, attributing MEV profits, and examining block production statistics from May to November 2025, the paper focuses on the two dominant builders—48Club and Blockrazor. The findings reveal that these entities produced over 96% of blocks and captured approximately 92% of MEV revenue. This concentration stems from BSC’s architectural design, which structurally compresses the MEV competition window and amplifies the advantage of low-latency infrastructure, rendering its MEV ecosystem significantly more centralized and fragile compared to Ethereum’s.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Scalability, Parallel & Distributed Systems

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrencies
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship

Abstract

We study the builder-driven MEV arbitrage on BNB Smart Chain (BSC). BSC's Proposer--Builder Separation (PBS) adopts a leaner design: only whitelisted builders can participate, blocks are produced at shorter intervals, and private order flow bypasses the public mempool. These features have long raised community concerns over centralization, which we empirically confirm by tracing arbitrage activity of the two dominant builders from May to November 2025. Within months, 48Club and Blockrazor produced over 96\% of blocks and captured about 92\% of MEV profits. We find that profits concentrate in short, low-hop arbitrage routes over wrapped tokens and stablecoins, and that block construction rapidly converges toward monopoly. Beyond concentration alone, our analysis reveals a structural source of inequality: BSC's short block interval and whitelisted PBS collapse the contestable window for MEV competition, amplifying latency advantages and excluding slower builders and searchers. MEV extraction on BSC is not only more centralized than on Ethereum, but also structurally more vulnerable to censorship and weakened fairness.

Problem

• MEV
• centralization
• Proposer-Builder Separation
• BNB Smart Chain
• arbitrage

Innovation

• MEV
• Proposer-Builder Separation
• BNB Smart Chain
• centralization
• latency advantage