I've recently become a bit obsessed with MEV... To put it simply, the ones most hurt by on-chain "queue jumping" aren't high-frequency traders, but rather honest folks like me who just do simple swaps and think setting slippage limits makes it safe. What you see as a completed transaction might actually be someone pushing you from both sides, causing the price to move slightly and then pull back, turning your small slippage buffer into someone else's profit.

What's more frustrating is that sorting this out is hard to explain as right or wrong: validators/packagers see themselves as selling resources, searchers see themselves as optimizing, and in the end, ordinary users are left with just "wait for confirmation." A few days ago, when the cross-chain bridge was hacked and oracles reported errors, many in the group reflexively said to wait for more confirmations, which is basically an implicit acceptance: on-chain isn't just about computing power and code, but also an invisible queue. Whoever can jump the line rewrites your expectations.

My current clumsy approach is: split orders whenever possible, don't put large amounts in at once; if I see abnormal fluctuations, I prefer not to act—missed opportunities are fine, since if I can't profit, it's just paying tuition.