I’m increasingly feeling that the “cutting in line” on-chain, to put it plainly, mostly doesn’t target the big players—it’s more about tripping up people like us retail traders who are just a bit too quick, tapping a couple times and wanting the trade to go through… I can’t really say whether it’s fair or unfair, but my gut feeling is: you think your order will execute at the price you clicked, but in reality someone has already peeked ahead and slipped in a higher tip, and then you end up carrying the load for others—paying “tuition fees” on their behalf.

After reviewing a few orders where I got hit hard by slippage, they were always the same: the moment the market moved and I rushed to chase, the ordering got thrown off. Even though it’s publicly transparent on-chain, execution still ends up being “who queues better gets to eat first.” Lately, everyone’s been complaining that validators/miners make quite a nice income from MEV, and I can understand why they want to profit—but this feeling really does resemble the liquidation waterfall in a perpetuals market: it’s not that you made the wrong call; it’s that the mechanism pushes you into the pit. In any case, now I only dare to place orders a bit more slowly—I’d rather miss out than be the one who gets cut in line.