These days, people are talking about MEV again, and I can’t stop thinking about the scene from back when I went to the train station to buy tickets: there’s only one window, the line looks pretty fair, but somehow someone always squeezes in from the side. The tickets aren’t like they weren’t sold to you—there’s just an extra wait, and the price jitters a bit more. On-chain “queue jumping,” to put it plainly, doesn’t mainly affect the emotions of big players; it affects people like us who chase small opportunities—slippage, the transaction ordering, and that kind of suffocating frustration when you clearly clicked to confirm, but you still get wedged in the middle.

What’s even more interesting is that lately, testnet incentives and points expectations have really pumped everyone’s mindset to the max, with people day after day guessing whether the mainnet will issue tokens. The more this kind of “don’t miss out” atmosphere builds, the easier it is for everyone to swarm in all at once, and the little undercurrents in the ordering become even more obvious.

Next time, I might stop chasing those kinds of entry points where a bunch of people crowd in—I’d rather move slower and come in batches… What kind of order placement habits do you all have that aren’t so frustrating?