How the Goodwill Alliance Slashed Sandwich Attacks by 95%

In March 2025, the BNB Chain community launched the Goodwill Alliance (GWA) — a collaborative initiative to mitigate malicious MEV, particularly sandwich attacks, on BNB Smart Chain(BSC). Backed by validators, builders, and infrastructure providers, the Alliance has made notable progress toward building a safer and fairer on-chain trading environment. Here’s a quick look at what’s been achieved– and what’s next…

Key Achievements:95% Drop in Sandwich Attacks 

• Since the launch of the Goodwill Alliance, BNB Chain has seen a significant reduction in sandwich attacks, a major step toward user protection and validator integrity.
• Sandwich Attack Volume Plummets: According to dashboards from BNBChain, and Hildobby, coordinated efforts have brought attack volume down by over 95%

• Daily attack frequency fell from 140K to under 1K: Both front-running and back-running attacks are now significantly less than earlier in 2025.
• Full validator participation: All active validators now enforce GWA protections by integrating MEV-protected builders. 
• Infrastructure-level support: Contributors like 48Club, BlockRazor, BloxRoute, and NodeReal,etc are providing key support. The Lorentz upgrade reduced block times, giving builders only a tiny window to detect and filter sandwich attacks—efficiency they demonstrated during the Binance Alpha TGE and campaigns. With the Maxwell hard fork lowered block time further to 0.75 seconds, making protection tooling more critical than ever.
• Built-in protection in major wallets: Wallets such as Trust Wallet, Binance Wallet, OKX Wallet, TokenPocket, and SafePal have integrated automatic MEV protection directly into their native swap interfaces.

Builders & Validators Contributions

All builders in the Goodwill Alliance have integrated sandwich filtering algorithms into their block-building logic, ensuring that malicious MEV bundles — especially sandwich patterns — are proactively excluded from block proposals, reinforcing user protection across BNB Smart Chain. 

To support transparency, GWA launched a public performance dashboard.

48 Club proposed bscexorcist, an open-source sandwich attack detector tailored for GWA.

It identifies the same patterns (buy→buy→sell or sell→sell→buy), even across blocks — addressing attack vectors beyond single-bundle detection. The proposal recommends formally adopting it into the GWA toolkit to improve real-time and historical attack monitoring.

BlockRazor has contributed significantly in both education and tooling:

• Content: Deep-dive blogs explaining BNBChain MEV dynamics and sandwich defense strategies (Blog 1, Blog 2)
• Monitoring Tools: Real-time MEV trackers, bundle inspectors, and public monitor for transparency and accountability

Validators are essential enforcers in the alliance by:

• Accepting block bids only from verified, GWA-compliant builders
• Participating in testing and feedback loops for new detectors
• Supporting faster propagation and adoption of filtered, MEV-safe blocks

Together, this creates a multi-layered defense system — builderfiltering +validator enforcement — that has reshaped MEV dynamics on BNB Chain.

What Challenges Remain? 

Despite significant progress, new challenges are emerging as the sophistication of MEV strategies evolves. GWA is now focused on improving detection granularity, refining builder standards, and enhancing community-driven infrastructure.

Current Challenges:

• Cross-block attacks are still difficult to detect and require consistent labeling logic and advanced pattern recognition.
• Trade-offs among latency, detection accuracy, and economic viability persist for builders and validators.
• Lack of standardized tooling makes performance comparisons of different ecosystem participants difficult.

What’s Next for the GWA

To address these challenges, GWA will implement the following:

• Performance Benchmarking Build shared tools to track and quantify sandwich attacks transparently on-chain.
• Builder Entry & Exit Criteria Set clear requirements:
  • Entry: Clear minimum detection capabilities, open-source transparency, and community alignment.
  • Exit: Repeated underperformance or non-compliance will lead to removal from the GWA allowlist.
• Open Collaboration & Reviews Conduct quarterly reviews, integrate public dashboards, and create stronger feedback loops among validators, builders, and researchers to continuously refine MEV defense strategies.
• Further optimize the trading experience by leveraging new mechanisms to reduce confirmation latency and improve transaction ordering, making trading smoother and safer.

Final Thoughts

The Goodwill Alliance proves what’s possible when infrastructure providers, validators, and developers work together. While the fight against malicious MEV isn’t over, BNB Chain now stands as a model for how ecosystems can take action — and deliver real impact — at scale.