I now tend to believe: on-chain front-running (MEV/ordering) the first to be hurt isn’t the “smart people,” but those ordinary traders who think they’re queuing up according to the rules… to put it plainly, when you execute a swap/mint, the price and the order of transactions may already have been targeted and rewritten by others. The most impacted scenarios are slippage being eaten, worse execution, or even getting sandwiched so you end up paying a higher cost and learning the hard way; while market makers/arbitrageurs treat this as a routine cost—if they can hedge, they hedge.

I can also understand the recent backlash against the whole “staking again, shared security, yield stacking” setup being called “nested dolls”: the underlying ordering isn’t fair enough, and once you stack the returns on top, the underlying risks stack up too. Anyway, when I look at projects now, I don’t just look at APY—first, I go check on-chain: transaction failure rate, same-block frontrunning/run-ahead traces, builder/relay dependencies… only what can be written into a cheat sheet counts.