I tried once to chase a “seems very stable” small pool on-chain, thinking I could quickly get in and out, but slippage taught me a lesson. To put it simply, it wasn’t that I was slow—it was that the pool’s depth was too thin. Once I placed my order, I effectively pushed myself into a worse price level, and because the trade was split into two fills, I also ended up getting charged more fees—another cut.

When I look back, the takeaway is this: don’t treat the order book like decoration—first check whether the depth can actually absorb your size. And don’t do a “full send in one bite” with your order timing; split it into a few parts, wait a few seconds to see whether the order book refills. Sometimes it feels more like you’re trading as a person rather than just executing a bot-like plan.

By the way, the community is arguing nonstop right now about the compliance boundaries for privacy coins and mixers, and that’s made me even more cautious. The more “righteous” the stories people tell sound, the more you need to focus on the most basic things: can you exit, and what will it cost you to do so? That’s it for now—today I’ll just count this as paying tuition.