Recently, for the third time, I’ve seen someone complain about, “Why does on-chain keep getting cut in line?” To put it simply, MEV is something that’s first felt—most sharply—by ordinary fills: you think you’re trading against the pool, but in reality you’re racing against a group of people who are watching the order flow and competing for sequencing. Slippage, getting sandwiched, and even when you place a limit order it somehow still misses by just a breath… all of it is pretty infuriating. Even more subtly, a lot of what gets called “fairness” is really moving costs from some people to others—whoever controls the power to determine the order can decide whether your order truly counts as “in sequence.”

Over the past couple of days, RWA and U.S. Treasury yields have been brought up again for comparison with on-chain yield products, and it makes me feel a bit uneasy. Over in the traditional market, a large part of the “certainty” comes from rules and the matching mechanism. If the underlying on-chain ordering is still fighting itself, then the risk isn’t just yield volatility—execution itself could even be manipulated. In any case, my orders have been going in more slowly now. I’d rather miss a few opportunities than become fuel for someone else.