MEV in Binance Builder
For blockchain researchers and practitioners, it empirically confirms centralization concerns in BSC's PBS design and reveals structural vulnerabilities to censorship and fairness erosion.
This paper studies builder-driven MEV arbitrage on BNB Smart Chain, finding that two dominant builders produce over 87% of blocks and capture ~90%+ of MEV profits, with concentration worsening due to short block intervals and whitelisted PBS.
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.