Recently, I’ve been checking my swap records on the blockchain again, and I just realized: I thought I had made a mistake in drawing the line, but it turns out that some of it wasn’t due to my clumsiness, I was actually “cut in line.” MEV, to put it simply, is about who gets in line closer to the front; the more you’re prioritized, the more favorable the price. An ordinary person just clicks confirm, and they might get caught in the middle, suffering slippage—whether you lose or not feels like a gamble. It’s an opportunity for market makers and arbitrageurs, but for small-scale traders like me, it’s just a cost, and it’s psychologically more frustrating: the rules are public, but the experience doesn’t feel “fair” at all.

What’s more annoying is that recently the community has been arguing about whether privacy coins and coin mixing should be banned outright, and where the compliance boundaries really are… Listening to it, I feel a bit discouraged: on one hand, they say they want to protect privacy, but on the other hand, they want to wipe out all “possible cut-ins,” and in the end, it’s still us who don’t understand the ins and outs who get hit. Anyway, I’ll just try to make small, incremental trades, keep slippage narrow, and avoid complex routing if I can. That’s how I’ll do it for now.