Shutter Network’s Encrypted Mempool Could Slash BNB Chain’s Sandwich Attacks—But Will Traders Actually Play Nice?

Front-running bots on BNB Chain might finally meet their match. Shutter Network proposes encrypting transaction mempools—a move that could turn DeFi’s predatory trading playground into a fairer arena.

How it works: By masking pending transactions until execution, the protocol cuts off the data stream sandwich attackers rely on to front-run retail trades. No more sniffing out juicy swaps to exploit.

The catch? This puts a target on arbitrage bots’ backs—the same ’liquidity providers’ that conveniently profit from every price slippage. Expect resistance disguised as ’efficiency concerns’ from certain quant firms.

If implemented, this could be the rare crypto upgrade that actually helps the little guy. But in a space where ’code is law’ often means ’the rich get richer,’ color us cautiously optimistic.

Per the proposal, Shutter Network’s initiative is “motivated by the ethical vision of the.” The latter, says the team, works to protect user interests.

Therefore, it proposes that validators on Binance Chain can include encrypted transactions in block proposals. The team explains that when a user submits a transaction, the solution encrypts it before it enters the mempool. This means that validators, builders, and bots can see the contents. Transactions are decrypted only after block finalization, and transaction order is locked in.

This “effectively eliminate[es] the opportunity for front-running, as has already been demonstrated on the,” it claims.

Shutter Network adds that the proposal is a joint effort by,, and. They submitted it as a BNB Chain Evolution Proposal (BEP) for BNB Chain community consideration.

Meanwhile, the proposal doesn’t “yet commit to specific assignments, milestones, or resources.” The team says that it would define implementation tasks and deliverables in future phases.

Encrypted Memepools Are Crucial, Vitalik Buterin Says

Shutter Network argues that there has been an increase in MEV activity on BNB Chain. It impacted more than $1.5 billion in DEX trades in a single day in late 2024. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was also a recent victim, the announcement highlights.

Meanwhile,co-founder Vitalik Buterin has named encrypted mempools as “crucial” components to a successful implementation of many of the designs that would combat the issues of value extraction. He explained that encrypted mempools are “a technology where users broadcast their transactions in encrypted form, along with some kind of proof of their validity. […] The transactions are included into blocks in encrypted form, without the block builder knowing the contents.”

@norswap champions threshold‐encrypted mempools as the neutral way to protect users from frontrunning, leveraging Shutter’s proven system on Gnosis Chain to lock in transaction order before decryption.

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Furthermore, Luis Bezzenberger, Head of Product at brainbot, a Core contributor to Shutter Network, argues that most current MEV solutions address this issue at the surface level. Furthermore, they introduce centralization and rely on manual processes to blacklist users.

“While these may offer short-term relief, they’re difficult to sustain over the long term,” Bezzenberger says. “If validators want to show true goodwill to the BNB Chain community, the single most impactful step they can take is to commit to processing encrypted transactions by implementing an encrypted mempool using (distributed) threshold encryption.”

Meanwhile, Shutter Network’s proposed threshold-encrypted mempool has been live on a dedicated OPstack testnet since March 2024 and on Gnosis Chain since July 2024. It has also created a whitepaper for implementing this method on the ethereum mainnet.