These past two days, I’ve been staring at the block explorer until my eyes blur, and I’ve also seen a string of clearly “cutting in line” transactions. Put simply, whoever has the ordering advantage—who’s willing to pay more, who knows how to get around/route around it, and who does it first—gets taken care of first. The biggest impact isn’t necessarily from big players; it’s actually those ordinary people who think that once they click confirm, it’s settled: slippage gets swallowed, the execution price gets distorted, and in the end, they still think it’s just because they were slow.

Lately, the testnet’s incentives and points have been pretty enticing too, and in the group, people ask every day, “Will the mainnet issue tokens?” What I’m more concerned about is this: everyone is going crazy interacting just for those points, turning the transaction-order race into an even more cutthroat contest—until the on-chain experience starts to feel more like grabbing numbers.

For a moment, I really wanted to exit these channels, or even uninstall the wallet plugin… but then I thought about how my little validation node still has to keep running, and how this infrastructure is inherently boring yet important. First, finish the checklist of what needs to be done—if I can avoid chasing the hype, then I’ll just avoid it.