These past two days, I’ve been reading about all that MEV “cut-in line” stuff again. Put simply: whoever gets packaged first, and whoever gets on later.

I used to think this was far from people like me who just stay parked in stable pools. But I actually ran into it— I was only trying to swap some coins and top up my position, and then the slippage suddenly got me for a chunk. When I went back to check the on-chain records, I realized that somewhere in the middle, someone had forcibly shoved in a few transactions, pinning me in between as a stepping stone… It’s not that anyone was maliciously targeting me. It’s just that this whole transaction-ordering thing by default tends to look after whoever pays more and whoever is better at writing scripts. So the ones most affected are ordinary retail users and people dealing with small amounts. The more desperate you are, the more likely you are to lose money.

Recently, whenever a new L1/L2 launches and throws incentives out to pull TVL, old users start complaining about “mining and selling,” and I get it. Once the rewards come, there are more people racing to front-run; the chain gets more crowded; and in the end, the trading experience and the sense of fairness actually get worse.

Forget it—I’m not going to mess with it for now.