MEV in Binance Builder

TL;DR

This paper analyzes builder-driven MEV arbitrage on BNB Smart Chain, revealing high centralization, profit concentration, and structural vulnerabilities due to BSC's design features like short block intervals and whitelisted builders.

Contribution

It provides the first empirical analysis of MEV in BSC's PBS system, highlighting centralization and structural factors that amplify inequality and vulnerability.

Findings

Two dominant builders produced over 87% of blocks and captured 90%+ of MEV profits.

Profits mainly come from short, low-hop arbitrage routes over wrapped tokens and stablecoins.

BSC's design features accelerate monopoly formation and reduce contestability.

Abstract

We study 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 the arbitrage activities of the two dominant builders from Apr. 1, 2025 to Feb. 28, 2026 (full observable activity cycle). Within months, the two leading builders, \bd{48Club} and \bd{Blockrazor}, produced over 87\% of blocks and captured about 90\%+ 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 fairness erosion.