I’ve been watching the mempool so closely my eyes are getting dry— the more I look, the more it feels like real-world queueing: you think it’s first come, first served, but then someone slips a “tip” in and cuts to the front of you. To put it simply, with MEV and this kind of ordering game, the most miserable part isn’t actually the whales—it’s the small retail traders who are just starting to swap something on-chain. They think their slippage was stolen, but they assume it’s just because they’re clumsy.

What’s more subtle is that lately, everyone has been comparing RWA—things like US bond yields—to on-chain yield products, and I can’t help but find it a bit funny: on-chain yields aren’t always “produced”; sometimes they’re distributed as a side effect of “ordering”… what you earn might be the cost of someone else getting front-run. It’s depressing, sure, but it’s not hopeless. At least more and more people are starting to talk about fair ordering and transaction protection. In any case, before I place an order now, I take a deep breath—if I can set a limit price, I set it, so I don’t end up as just a “sample” in someone else’s replay.