BNB Chain Hit by Record Sandwich Attacks in November, Impacting Thousands of Traders

A file 35.5% of BNB Chain’s blocks had been affected by Sandwich assaults in November.

Over the previous week alone, 645 Sandwich Bots had been discovered to be energetic on the chain. In whole, roughly 43,400 DEX merchants had been impacted throughout the complete ordeal.

Sandwich Bots Exploit BNB Chain

In accordance with data compiled by Dune Analytics, the buying and selling quantity on BNB Chain’s DEX reached $9.232 million that week, with Sandwich Bot transactions contributing $1.322 million.

A sandwich assault, which can also be known as front-running, is an MEV approach the place an attacker identifies a pending transaction and strategically locations orders earlier than and after it, successfully surrounding the goal transaction. Whereas front-running is likely one of the commonest MEV strategies, different methods like back-running and transaction ordering manipulation additionally happen.

Some of these assaults are particularly prevalent on decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms and decentralized exchanges (DEXs), the place the mempool’s transparency exposes transactions earlier than they’re confirmed.

In distinction, Ethereum has seen a discount in Sandwich assaults since July, with the proportion dropping from 62.9% to 40.2% over the previous 5 months. Through the previous month, over 12,000 DEX customers on the community fell sufferer to those assaults.

Sandwich Assaults on Solana

Solana too has seen a big improve in these assaults this 12 months. Because of this, the Solana Basis took decisive motion towards validators concerned in sandwich assaults in June 2024. The muse removed a bunch of validator operators from its delegation program for his or her involvement in these assaults, including that any validators engaged in such conduct can be completely excluded and have their stake eliminated.

Tim Garcia, Solana Validator Relations Lead, reaffirmed that enforcement would proceed as the muse detects operators taking part in such malicious actions. Mert Mumtaz, co-founder of Solana RPC supplier Helius, defined that whereas Solana’s design prevents these assaults, some actors modified their validators to allow them. Mumtaz additionally recommended that different stake swimming pools may undertake comparable insurance policies towards sandwich assaults sooner or later.