Lately, I’ve been seeing on-chain traces of sandwich attacks plus arbitrage, and my mood is pretty complicated. You think you’ve been quick and snatched up a bit of price spread, but once you step into the pool, slippage feels like it was written in advance by someone—once you add up the fees and the losses, it’s basically just doing work for other people. Especially when new L1/L2s first launched incentives to pull TVL, everyone was rushing to “mine, buy, and sell.” Liquidity would show up for a moment and then disappear; the more urgently you trade, the easier it is to get squeezed. Even when I’m just bridging across chains, I have to keep checking repeatedly—let alone chasing after trades like these.

Now I basically don’t bother chasing explanations. A lot of the time it’s just random—you didn’t do anything wrong, and you might just happen to be on the other side of a more clever/faster opponent. Anyway, I’d rather move a bit slower: place small orders, split them into batches, and avoid touching anything I can—so I can sleep more soundly.