There’s been more and more arguing about “on-chain front-running”—who it really harms. To put it plainly, most people only see that their own swap costs a little more money, and then they start complaining. The ones who have it worse are actually ordinary users who think they’re getting filled at quoted prices: their slippage gets eaten, their trades get split, and they may not even realize whether they’re being front-run or if the routing went off course. Project teams also have a hard time—if liquidity is thinner, they’re even more likely to be treated like an ATM, and when the user experience turns bad, they end up taking the blame.

Later, I realized that “fairness” isn’t just about having a pretty-looking ordering rule. It’s also about who you treat as the default victim: retail users, LPs, or market makers. Recently, before and after an upgrade/maintenance of a major public chain, everyone wondered whether people would migrate. I don’t think whether they migrate or not is the key—the key is that the on-chain ordering and packaging process doesn’t change. Move to somewhere else and it’s still the same thing: getting front-run. Anyway, I’d rather go slower, split my orders, and not aggressively hit a single price point—I don’t want to hand money to the snatchers.