Lately I keep hearing people talk about block builders and bundling, honestly retail investors really don’t need to treat it as a mandatory course… Just get a rough idea: the transaction you send may not be added to the chain in the order you want; it might be optimized by the “bundler” in the middle, like a food delivery order being rearranged by the platform, whoever pays more gets priority. Don’t get caught up in the insider drama, the key is not to set too large a slippage, not to use unknown routing, and not to chase those “just right” prices that are obviously fishing tricks.

Now there’s a lot of noise about NFT royalties, but it’s pretty much the same logic: everyone wants to cut in line in the same queue but doesn’t want to pay extra… liquidity and creator income are pulling in opposite directions. Anyway, my own standard is, if I can explain to friends “why my transaction price might change, why I get front-run,” that’s enough; anything deeper I leave to the real researchers.