People keep asking me lately: how far should retail traders understand about block builders and bundles, and these kinds of things, before it’s enough? Honestly, you don’t need to force yourself into becoming a researcher—you just need to form a few “habits”: when you see trades go unusually smoothly, slippage is inexplicably weird, or you’re being sandwiched even though you didn’t front-run in the first place, just assume you’re on the same stage as a bunch of packagers. Don’t rush to blame the exchange or complain that “your luck is bad.”

What I personally care about more is: split large or urgent orders as much as possible, don’t use weird callback contracts to swap tokens, and don’t max out approval permissions with a single click. If you can use private transactions, use them (at least don’t hang your intent blatantly in the public mempool). As for things like “which builder is the worst,” ordinary people actually have a hard time verifying. On-chain data tools and the tagging system are also kind of awkward right now—they lag behind, and they can still mislead people. Staring at those leaderboards makes it easy to get more and more anxious the longer you look.

Anyway, in the long run, developing trading habits of not greedily trying to eat everything in one bite is more useful than memorizing the bundle mechanism inside and out.