Recently, everyone has been staring at the unlock calendar so much that they're almost hallucinating, attributing everything to "selling pressure coming." But I feel a more painful kind of "selling pressure" — that chain-on MEV front-running. To put it simply, it's not about who is smarter, but who can be seen earlier by the sequencer: you want to swap at the public price in the pool, but someone pre-fills a transaction to push the price away, then takes the spread behind your back. You pay the slippage, and they get the lunch money.

Most of the biggest impacts don't come from whales, but from ordinary people who only swap a few hundred dollars, with no energy to set a bunch of parameters or use private channels. My roommate even mocked me: "You study fairness all day, but in the end, you still have to manually raise the slippage to get your trade through..." Yeah, that's right. On-chain, it's so straightforward — rules are written in code, but how the order is queued isn't really "everyone is equal." For now, let's leave it at that and slowly stir the pudding.