BSC is seeing a comeback with over 120K DEX traders affected sandwich attack

BNB Smart Chain (BSC) has seen an increase in sandwich attacks this week alone, with over 120,000 decentralized Exchange (DEX) traders being affected. The revival coincides with an increase in activity on the network.

According to X’s Dragonfly data analyst Hildobby, the network saw a surge in sandwich attacks around mid-May, with numbers continuing to rise, particularly during the last week of May and the first week of June. Data shows that the number of sandwich dex traders has exceeded 100,000 for the second consecutive week, with trading volumes exceeding $1 billion.

The 120K DEX trader was the victim of a sandwich attack on BSC in the first week of June (source: Hildobby)

A sandwich attack is a type of strand market manipulation in which an attacker ultimately carries out the victim’s transaction by inserting a transaction to extract value from the victim’s transaction. The attacker artificially raises the price of the token by placing a buy order before the victim’s transaction, and then profits from the inflated value by placing a sell order immediately after the transaction.

This issue has been a major and long-standing problem with distributed exchanges, as attackers use Maximum Extract Value (MEV) bots to automate processes. Interestingly, attacks occur due to the inherent nature of the DEX infrastructure.

All submitted transactions are sent to a commonly visible memory pool (Mempool) before the miner selects the transactions to perform. Attackers can manipulate transactions from here by offering higher rates to ensure miners sort the transactions in an advantageous way.

This issue has long been an issue for BSC, with over a third of blocks on the network including transactions affected by the sandwich attack on December 1, 2024. However, it is not unique to BSC as other networks such as Ethereum and Solana must also be addressed. One address in 2024, Jaredfromsubway.ETH, earned more than $40 million in revenue with a profit of $6.3 million within three months of the sandwich attack.

The BNB chain has previously tackled a sandwich attack

However, the BNB chain previously addressed this issue by introducing MEV protection to some wallets earlier this year. At the time, the network said there were three solutions: allowing users to have automatic or manual MEV protection, or allowing them to customize protection for advanced users.

Automatic protection was available for selected wallets, such as Trust Wallet, Binance Wallet, OKX Wallet, Token Pocket Wallet, SafePal, etc., but other wallets could manually set up the functionality. This solution appeared to have worked previously as sandwich attacks fell significantly between late March and early May 2025. However, it appears to have been picked up again.

Interestingly, the revival coincides with an increase in DEX transactions in BSC, with the network recording large transaction volumes. Dune’s data shows that the network recorded 69 million transactions in the first week of June and 58.45 million transactions in the last week of May.

Interestingly, the impact of recent sandwich attacks is minimal. This is because it has only affected a small percentage of transactions within the last two weeks. Over 776,000 transactions were sandwiched in the first week of June, while around 207,000 transactions were sandwiched. In the previous week, there were only about 1 million total sandwich-related transactions.

Even more surprising, the number of sandwich bots on BSC has dropped on average to below 300 since early April. This represents a major drop from almost 9,000 sandwich bots in mid-February.

BSC sees a surge in transaction volume-driven

Meanwhile, the surge in BSC transaction volumes was due to the Binance Alpha program, which was introduced on May 20th. It has lit up early-stage Web3 projects for users to access to tokens and airdrops, driving many new users into the network, and spiked DEX volumes.

According to Defilama, BSC has been the leading network of DEX volumes over the past 30 days, far surpassing the $1471.8 billion Solana, reaching second place at $793.1 billion. The network also leads daily volumes at $3.63 billion.

BSC flips Solana with Memecoin activity (source: Jason Yanowitz)

Interestingly, Solana tipped Solana over with the Memecoin Trading volume, showing how much of a program had an impact. However, many observers believe that washing transactions are escalating trading volumes as users try to farm points through the Binance Alpha initiative.