This is the third time I’ve seen people complain about “unfairness on-chain,” and I can sort of understand it. But if we’re going to spell it out clearly, queue-jumping doesn’t just mean “I pay a little more gas for my transaction.” Who has the power to decide the ordering priority and what rules determine the sequence decides who gets to hit slippage first and who gets sandwiched in the middle as a human buffer—especially in cross-chain workflows, where one step gone wrong can delay the entire process end to end. The worst part is thinking you’re standing in line, when in reality you’re just being squeezed and pushed aside.

The airdrop season is pretty obvious too. Anti-bot efforts by task platforms are getting more and more like attendance check-ins, and the “farming crowd” is competing with the kind of intensity you’d see at work. But on-chain queue-jumping raises the cost and the uncertainty by another notch. In the end, ordinary users may get too lazy to bother, and the flow becomes even more concentrated in the hands of a small number of people who “know how to queue-jump” (insert themselves into the ordering). Plainly speaking: fairness may not always be achievable, but at least it should be predictable. Otherwise, the moment a bridge runs into bad weather, everyone will end up taking a share of the blame—and that’s the most uncomfortable feeling.