Recently, I’ve been looking at MEV’s “queue-jumping” drama again. Put simply, it’s about who can decide the order of transactions. On the surface, it looks like arbitrage bots are battling each other, but in reality, the people who get squeezed to the very back of the queue are often the ones who are simply following the rules: they confirm the transaction on time—but end up with a bit more slippage, a bit slower execution, and sometimes even miss the window entirely for certain mints/airdrops. On-chain, it’s like lining up at a spaceport: everyone crowds around the same porthole to watch the stars, but someone has a pass.

What’s even more annoying is the whole “restaking/sharing security” “yield stacking” hype lately, which has been criticized as a set of nested dolls. I understand it: on the one hand, they say they want to be fairer and more decentralized; on the other hand, they package ordering privileges/extraction privileges as “sources of yield,” and it honestly sounds pretty cyber. In any case, my current approach is fairly conservative—if I can use a limit order, I use one; if I can avoid crowded time slots, I avoid them. Romantic as it is, in practice I still want to get the cost of getting queue-jumped figured out first.