Recently, I saw people arguing about “on-chain fairness.” Put simply, most people are cursing queue-jumping—but the ones who really get slashed are ordinary people who just swap coins. You think one click means it gets filled, but others see it first, get the fill ahead of you, your slippage gets pushed up, and you end up having to pay an extra chunk in fees. And then you still blame the front end for being stuck. MEV isn’t some mystical thing—it’s simply ordering rights: who goes first and who goes later. The advantage all lies with whoever can offer higher tips, and whoever can run faster.

More annoying than that is that some projects, while loudly calling for decentralization, default to “pay for priority,” and package this up as market efficiency… When I see this kind of tokenomics, I feel like calling them out: you push the costs onto retail investors, while you end up eating like you’ve got a mouth full of oil.

Yesterday my colleague even asked me in the group whether mixing coins counts as a sin. I can only say this: privacy is a need, but when the compliance boundary is a one-size-fits-all cutoff, it ultimately ends up affecting ordering and censorship too. Whose transactions are “cleaner” are more likely to get approved—so fairness winds back around again. In any case, now if I can use a limit order, I won’t use a market order; I’d rather be slower than be a sponsor for paying queue-jumping fees.