These past couple of days, I’ve been deliberately telling myself to “pause” a bit: stop chasing orders, stop refreshing what’s happening on-chain, stop browsing those hot takes about rate-cut expectations + the US dollar index... No matter how the macro story gets interpreted, people will still argue about it; once prices start moving, everyone just finds their own “evidence.”

MEV, put simply, is people cutting in line on the chain. Who does it affect? It’s not the ones who cut in who suffer the most—the worst off are the group that thinks they’re “fairly queued up”: you make a swap, place a small limit order, and then you get squeezed by a sneaky cut-in, your slippage gets worse, and in the end the execution price feels like someone quietly snuck a bite out of it. As someone like me doing cross-DEX small arbitrage, I also get caught by the ordering sometimes, and what looks like a profitable edge on paper turns into nothing once you check on-chain—then I still have to pay gas, and my mindset completely breaks on the spot.

What I do now is: when the market is lively, I pause even more. Don’t treat every time nothing fills as “the market is targeting me.” Sometimes it’s simply that someone is cutting in front of you. If private routing is available, use it; if not, do fewer large trades. That’s it for now.