In the past few days, as I’ve been looking at L2 transaction flows, I’ve become increasingly convinced that “cutting in line” essentially boils down to who has the sorting power to exploit. Small users might just feel it as “why is there slippage again,” but for market makers/arbitrageurs, it’s their livelihood. When there’s congestion on the bridge, with fees and time delays piling up, retail investors end up footing the bill… It’s a bit frustrating.

Recently, AI agents placing automatic orders have also become quite popular, with hype running high, but what I’m more worried about is: as more bots appear, MEV search becomes more competitive, and for ordinary people, manually confirming transactions is basically putting themselves on the chopping block. Anyway, I now only use limit orders when I can, split orders when I can, and prefer to be slow on cross-chain transfers—at least to avoid being easily exploited by “automation,” which is too eager to profit.