Lately, I keep seeing a bunch of memes plus celebrity traders yelling “buy/sell” to get everyone moving—attention cycles fast, and both new and old traders always want to rush in as the “last one on the relay.” To be blunt, it’s more important to get the trading pipeline sorted out first. You don’t need to research terms like block builders and bundles down to writing a paper. For retail traders, it’s enough to know that “the fills you see aren’t necessarily the best execution on-chain.” Some people bundle a series of transactions and send them to the builder; priority ordering, sandwiching, and even rollbacks can all happen, and your market order / slippage settings are exactly the signals the other side loves to watch.

My bare-minimum understanding comes down to three points: 1) Don’t force it with big slippage, especially on hot coins. 2) If you can use limit orders, use limit orders—better to get fewer fills. 3) If you really want to chase the hype, split your orders, trade smaller amounts, and try a few times—don’t take it all in one go. As for deeper builder ecosystems, which relay to use, MEV details… you don’t have to research those. Just don’t make yourself look like “an easy target for sandwiching,” and that’s good enough. That’s it for now—I’ll tweak my usual slippage thresholds tonight, and as a bonus, run through the liquidity of a few pools I commonly use.