Dialogue with Sarah, Head of BNB Chain BD: In a bearish market, it is a good time to seek and support "quality projects."

Guest: Sarah, Head of BD at BNB Chain

*Interviewer: TB, *Fairy, ChainCatcher

In 2018, Sarah attended an ordinary offline gathering in Hong Kong, and this gathering changed the trajectory of her life. When she first heard the concept of "Bitcoin as peer-to-peer electronic cash," it felt like a lightning bolt struck her mind, instantly giving her a new understanding of the future financial system. This moment ignited her interest in the crypto world and became the starting point for her transition from traditional industries to the blockchain field.

Today, Sarah is the Head of BD at BNB Chain, actively involved in one of the largest public chain ecosystems in the world, dedicated to promoting deep collaboration between developers, project parties, and infrastructure.

During the 2025 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, ChainCatcher had the privilege of having an in-depth conversation with her. When discussing the current industry situation, she candidly stated that despite the uncertainties brought by macro policies and potential market fluctuations, she believes this is an excellent time for innovative projects to emerge. In her view, the market may cool down, but innovation will never freeze; true value will quietly grow during the winter.

This is also the philosophy of BNB Chain: to go against the trend during market downturns and support entrepreneurs. For example, the recent $100 million listing incentive and offline MVB incubation investment activities. This interview will delve into the ecological construction, growth strategies, Meme ecosystem support plans, and future plans of BNB Chain.

Sarah's Journey in Web3: Inspired by the Concept of Bitcoin

ChainCatcher: How did you first get involved with Web3? What important personal experiences did you have prior?

Sarah: After completing my studies in Hong Kong, I initially entered the traditional industry and worked at some large companies, such as Alibaba. My real entry into the crypto industry actually stemmed from an accidental opportunity. At that time, I attended an offline event in Hong Kong and was introduced to the concept of "Bitcoin as peer-to-peer electronic cash." That moment was very shocking for me. I felt that this idea was not only cool but also had the potential to truly change the world.

With this curiosity, excitement, and even a certain degree of belief, I began to delve deeper into the crypto industry. When I first entered the field, I was particularly eager to understand the underlying architecture of the entire blockchain network, such as how Layer 1 operates. Therefore, I often studied the leading projects on the market, especially focusing on those Layer 1 projects that emphasized underlying technology.

During this process, I was fortunate to join the NEO project, officially entering the crypto industry in 2018 and starting to participate in Layer 1 and ecosystem construction-related work. By 2023, I joined the BD team at BNB Chain. At that time, the team was still small, and I have been responsible for the expansion of Layer 1 ecosystem and Web3 for more than two years.

You could say that I entered this industry because of the concept of Bitcoin, and I have always focused on the development of Layer 1 and Web3 over the years. Even today, I remain full of belief and enthusiasm for this industry, especially its underlying technology.

Opportunities in a Down Market: Finding Super Projects and Developers

ChainCatcher: How do you view the survival and development of projects in a down market and political uncertainty?

Sarah: I believe that even in a bear market, hotspots and opportunities will still emerge. During downturns, projects can break out more easily because people's attention is more concentrated on fresh content.

Therefore, we believe that now is actually a good time to lay the groundwork. On one hand, the valuations of excellent teams and projects are more reasonable, which is beneficial for us to support and incubate them; on the other hand, if a project can accumulate long-term value and have a clear vision during this market phase, it is easier to gain attention and break through. You could say this is a window period for finding "super developers, super projects, and super ideas." We will continue to adopt an open attitude to discover and support these opportunities.

Multi-Chain Competition in the Meme Ecosystem: How Does BNB Chain Differentiate Itself?

ChainCatcher: Other public chains like Solana and Base are also promoting competition in the Meme ecosystem. What are their advantages? In contrast, what unique advantages does BNB Chain have?

Sarah: Base's advantage lies in gathering many local developer resources from Europe and the United States, which is very beneficial for them to build ecosystems and promote application development.

From our own perspective, we are also actively expanding into the North American market, for example, through offline events, recruiting local teams, and continuously promoting cooperation with American institutions. We have already seen initial results, such as VanEck applying for a BNB ETF and Coinbase Advanced launching BNB perpetual contracts, which are important progress driven by our efforts. We hope that BNB can achieve circulation and exposure in more North American scenarios, further penetrating through developer ecosystems, hackathons, and other forms.

Regarding Solana, the previous price surge of SOL brought significant market momentum and created a wealth effect and active user base on-chain.

BNB Chain has several prominent advantages in the Meme space:

First is the continuous liquidity incentive program. We have been promoting various incentive mechanisms to create a better launch environment for assets. For example, the previous $4.4 million liquidity incentive. This is crucial for meme projects, as obtaining initial liquidity support is key to attracting community attention and user participation.

Second, BNB Chain itself has a solid on-chain liquidity foundation. Currently, BNB Chain's TVL is around $7 billion, and the overall DeFi infrastructure is relatively mature. At the same time, we have established close cooperation with multiple wallets to ensure a smooth trading experience.

Additionally, support from CEX channels is also one of our advantages. We maintain close collaborative relationships with many centralized exchanges, and many meme projects that gain some popularity on BNB Chain will prompt these exchanges to actively list these assets.

ChainCatcher: The popularity of some top Meme projects on BNB Chain has declined. Does BNB Chain have any plans or support strategies to help them reactivate community and market vitality?

Sarah: One important initiative we are currently promoting is the "$100 million permanent liquidity support plan," which is not only aimed at meme projects but applies to all types of assets. As long as a project is listed on a CEX, we will provide certain liquidity support for it on-chain. We believe this will significantly enhance the on-chain liquidity and overall activity of the assets.

In addition to liquidity incentives, sustaining ecological heat is also a part we value greatly. Whether it is through various offline events we frequently organize in places like Hong Kong or through online content and community operations, we are continuously creating topics and attention for the BNB Chain ecosystem.

As long as the ecosystem maintains its heat, various projects will have the opportunity to be seen and become popular. We hope to drive innovation and vitality on-chain by providing a soil rich in growth potential and dissemination effects through dual engines of liquidity incentives and ecological heat.

Behind the Ecological Surge: Perspectives and Strategic Evolution of BNB Chain Builders

ChainCatcher: What are the main responsibilities of your team? What challenges or achievements have impressed you?

Sarah: In the BNB Chain BD team, we mainly focus on three areas of work. First is supporting developer ecosystem construction. Second is establishing and maintaining partnerships. Third is deep project incubation and resource matching.

Our team has actually faced quite a few challenges, including personnel changes, fluctuations in the market environment, and external developer feedback on the ecosystem. For example, there were recent issues related to MEV that affected some users' trading experiences, which is a direction that the entire team, especially the BD team, needs to address and improve. In the process of continuously solving problems, we are also learning and growing.

ChainCatcher: The BNB Chain ecosystem has recently shown signs of recovery. What efforts has the team made behind this? What key decisions have been made correctly?

Sarah: The recent recovery of the BNB Chain ecosystem has made us deeply aware of the strong power of the community. We observed that once the heat rises, the community spontaneously does many things—from seeking various communication angles to continuously creating new discussion hotspots; the entire atmosphere is very lively.

In this process, our team has been actively promoting various incentive programs, hoping to capture this wave of heat and the enthusiasm of developers. At the same time, we are also continuously advancing long-term incubation projects like MVB. For example, in MVB Season 9, whether it is the number of applications, project quality, or overall participation enthusiasm, there has been a noticeable increase.

This indicates that while the market is recovering, there are indeed a number of truly promising projects and ideas emerging, and we hope to keep them on BNB Chain through these plans, becoming a core force for long-term development.

In addition, we have been maintaining close cooperation with various infrastructure service providers in the ecosystem, such as exchanges, wallets, and cross-chain bridges. Our goal is to help projects in the ecosystem complete the entire process from early development to asset issuance and subsequent circulation. On one hand, we will support projects to issue assets natively on BNB Chain; on the other hand, we will also assist them in circulating and trading assets in more liquid scenarios.

ChainCatcher: How effective has this series of processes been so far?

Sarah: We have recently observed several positive trends. First, some promising new projects and ideas are being born and landing in the BNB Chain ecosystem, and developer activity has significantly increased.

Secondly, we recently had a stablecoin-related initiative—a gas-free stablecoin transfer incentive program—which has also led to a significant increase in the usage of stablecoins on BNB Chain. This year, at least six new stablecoin options have chosen to issue natively on BNB Chain. This indirectly reflects that we are gradually attracting more developers and project parties to join.

Not only new teams entering Web3, but even some projects that were originally launched on other chains are starting to migrate their projects to BNB Chain. We have also genuinely felt that the number of project parties and founders coming to us for communication and cooperation has significantly increased.

ChainCatcher: What are BNB Chain's future plans for building a more sustainable ecosystem to ensure the long-term retention and development of users and projects?

Sarah: We believe that the future of Web3 is certainly not limited to "competition for existing users." The real opportunities come from incremental users, and these increments often accompany new technological paradigms, new asset forms, and new gameplay innovations. Just like the DeFi Summer, the NFT craze, and the rise of GameFi, these breakthroughs from "0 to 1" are all new narratives that emerged at critical junctures.

From an infrastructure perspective, one of our key goals for 2025 is to comprehensively enhance the performance of BNB Chain. Specifically, our technical roadmap clearly states that we aim to gradually shorten the block time of BSC (Smart Chain) from 3 seconds to 1 second, ultimately achieving 0.75 seconds.

At the same time, we are also continuously focusing on the security of on-chain transactions, especially in terms of MEV governance. We are collaborating with builders in the ecosystem, such as BlockRazor and 48 Club, to explore more constructive protective solutions, focusing on issues like sandwich attacks to protect the fairness of transactions for ordinary users.

In terms of ecosystem construction, we are continuously making efforts across multiple main chains. The most representative is the MVB program, which is our long-term developer support mechanism. We hope to discover and support those truly promising and innovative development teams through MVB, bringing innovative Web3 products and ideas to BNB Chain, injecting new vitality into the ecosystem and attracting more Web2 users.

The Next Steps and Challenges for BNB Chain

ChainCatcher: What is the next growth point that BNB Chain is currently focusing on?

Sarah: We are focusing on three key areas: AI, stablecoins, and RWA.

• In the AI direction, we will continue to support those AI projects with landing potential over the long term. For example, in this MVB 9 session, there are 16 selected projects, 8 of which are related to AI.
• Regarding stablecoins, several new projects have chosen to launch on BNB Chain this year. We believe that stablecoins are one of the long-term core scenarios of Web3.
• In terms of RWA, we are actively exploring how to bring more real-world assets on-chain, promoting the integration of Web3 with the real economy.

In addition, various new DeFi products, such as new DEXs, lending protocols, and oracle infrastructure. As long as there are innovative ideas or directions in the DeFi space, BNB Chain will continue to maintain a high level of attention. At the same time, we will continue to support GameFi, DeSoc, DeSci, and other multidimensional possibilities.

From a longer-term perspective, we hope that BNB Chain can become a quality asset issuance platform. When developers or teams think about issuing assets, BNB Chain should be the first place that comes to mind—because it has sufficient on-chain liquidity and a complete trading ecosystem.

Currently, there is also a noticeable trend that centralized and decentralized liquidity is gradually merging. More and more CEXs realize that the future liquidity landscape is a combination of "on-chain + off-chain." Whoever can aggregate liquidity from various sources will occupy the core entry point of the next stage. This is also the role we hope BNB Chain will play—a foundational asset layer and the final settlement layer. Based on this, we will further expand into stablecoins, AI applications, DataFi, and more possibilities.

ChainCatcher: What challenges does BNB Chain currently face? How will they be addressed in the future?

Sarah: First, there is the uncertainty of the macro environment. From an economic perspective, the overall environment is currently unclear, which brings external pressure to the development of the entire crypto industry.

Secondly, there is a lack of truly "breakout" super applications at the application layer. Since the DeFi Summer and NFT craze, we have yet to see a new narrative or killer product of similar scale and impact. Overall, this round of application tracks seems somewhat flat, lacking sufficiently "sexy" projects that can attract a large user base.

ChainCatcher: Some users have reported that sandwich attacks on BNB Chain affect the on-chain trading experience. We also noticed that recent community calls have been discussing this issue. What progress has been made in BNB Chain's anti-sandwich efforts? What optimization plans are there for the future?

Sarah: Currently, we have two main directions for our protective work:

First, there is the integration at the infrastructure level. We have been communicating with various wallets, DeFi protocols, and other projects, hoping they can integrate and default to using MEV protection solutions. Because for ordinary users, they often do not understand these risks and do not know how to proactively avoid them. Therefore, we hope to provide "default protection" at the product level, making MEV protection a foundational infrastructure-level configuration that automatically serves users.

Second, there is collaboration with key roles in the ecosystem. We launched the "Good Will Alliance," and the two key builders of BNB Chain infrastructure, BlockRazor and 48 Club, have now deployed their respective "sandwich attack" filters into their block construction mechanisms.

Third, we have created a code repository for the alliance on GitHub and placed MEV good-will builders in a dedicated folder. We call on all BSC validators to only accept block bids from builders in this folder.

The progress in these three areas has already shown initial results. For example, in terms of on-chain users being affected by sandwich attacks, data shows that the number of sandwich attack transactions has significantly decreased, with daily numbers generally controlled to below 50, and even dropping to single digits multiple times.