These past couple of days, I’ve been watching a few large swap transactions. On the surface, the prices didn’t move much, but the transaction order was quite “lively.” To put it simply, the MEV front-running game is most directly squeezing out ordinary users: you think your transaction will go through when you click it, but someone else pre-fills the order, eating up the slippage, and if you chase in afterward, it’s like being led around by the nose.

Thinking about it later, it’s pretty funny—I was confidently analyzing block times, only to be quickly educated by the actual sequence the next second.

What’s more subtle is that the “sense of fairness” has been eroded: it’s not that I lack skill, but someone in the queue has cut in line and still holds a priority pass. Airdrop season is a bit like that too—everyone on the same chain doing tasks, earning points, with increasingly strict anti-sybil rules. The “grinding” folks are competing like clocking in at work, but in the end, it’s still the sorting algorithms and bots that scoop up the leftovers…
Now I’d rather do fewer transactions, even if it’s slower, than to fight head-to-head with queue jumpers on the most crowded path.