Just now, my phone popped up a little red dot reminder saying "Transaction Submitted," and I stared at that pending line for a long time... To be honest, on-chain transactions don't follow a first-come, first-served rule; the MEV sorting/queue-jumping system is all about: who offers a bigger tip, who takes a shortcut, who gets packaged first. The biggest impact isn't necessarily from large traders; it's actually from honest folks like us who just confirm transactions—slippage gets eaten, the execution price worsens, or sometimes transactions fail inexplicably, and we still pay gas fees.

My current approach is a bit like debugging: reproduce first, then draw conclusions. When I see the same swap at different times or routes yield very different results, I can pretty much guess someone has "messed with the system" in front of you. It's not entirely the miners/validators' fault; the system design rewards this behavior, but the sense of fairness really suffers.

By the way, recently hardware wallets are out of stock, and phishing links are everywhere, so everyone's security awareness has been forced to max... But many people only defend against "being stolen" and don't guard against "being front-run." I now prefer to go slower, using private transactions or anti-front-running entry points (use them if you can), anyway, I won't go all-in. Paying a little less tuition is better than anything else.