The BNB Chain has introduced the BNB Good Will Alliance which unites core members of the BNB community to implement initiatives that serve the interests of the BNB ecosystem. The alliance’s first effort is a push to reduce malicious MEV [maximum extractable value] like sandwich attacks on the chain.
BNB created the alliance in response to a vote of the BNB Chain DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) in February. It was suggested at that time that a new BNB Evolution Proposal (BEP) would “take all technology and non-technology weapons to reduce malicious MEV.”
BNB Chain rallies the community against MEV
The alliance promises to undertake off-chain efforts to establish best practices and ethical standards that could then be accepted through BNB governance, BEPs, and BNB Chain coding. The alliance’s first move will be to oppose sandwich attacks, which are a way of illicitly achieving MEV.
As part of their efforts, BlockRazor, a startup building on BNB Chain, and 48 Club, which describes itself as a Binance privacy protection partner, have deployed sandwich attack filters. They are described by BNB Chain as “key builders.”
In addition, in the GitHub repository for the alliance, builders with “MEV good will” will be recorded in a folder. BNB Chain urged validators to accept block bids only from builders indicated in the folder.
The next steps will be to create a good definition of sandwich attacks, create “toolings” to spot sandwich attacks, and build more infrastructure to detect and prevent MEV through community collaboration. Some community members, such as PancakeSwap, a decentralized crypto exchange that runs on BNB Chain, have an MEV Guard that engages automatically during transactions.
Binance has already been taking steps on the exchange side to maintain orderly business. Earlier this month, Binance announced that it institutes community votes on the listing or delisting of tokens of its choice. A few days after that, Binance delisted a market maker and a project for misconduct.
MEV is technically and morally complicated
According to BNB Chain, illicit MEV is often made possible when the attacker finds a high-value transaction in the mempool (“where verified but unconfirmed transactions are stored until they are included in a block”). The attacker then places its own trades for the same asset on both sides of the user’s transaction.
As a result, the victimized user pays an inflated price because the preceding, attacking trade raised the price of the asset. Then the attacker immediately sells its shares of the asset at the inflated price.
That is far from the only way to apply. Not all MEV is considered malicious. There are no rules for the application of MEV, which can be seen as rightfully identifying inefficiency in the consensus procedure.
Malicious MEV is a problem across all chains. An Ethereum researcher recently proposed a new mechanism to eliminate MEV, among other things, on that chain.
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