I’ve been researching what’s going on with on-chain transaction ordering lately. Honestly, a lot of people think MEV is something far removed from them, but in reality, who is actually affected by getting cut in line on-chain? Put simply, small retail users and normal contract interactions get pinned down.

When I wrote scripts to run strategies myself, I ran into sandwich attacks several times—on paper the slippage was calculated, but in practice I still got squeezed out, and my costs literally doubled. Basically, the more urgently you try to get the trade done, the easier it is to get cut. When those new L1/L2s roll out incentives and pull in TVL, old users complain about “digging to sell the pickaxe,” and that’s also because this kind of ordering is opaque—the real winners are miners and the machines.

It’s not that new technology has no value, but in the end, the whole liquidity mining playbook often turns into paying robots instead. At the end of the day, what matters most is on-chain fairness—specifically the ordering rules and defense mechanisms. As for how to defend against it? I usually just test across a few chains with more runs, or simply set a fixed slippage and don’t track the market. For now, that’s it—the guys who like to trade fast and cash out have it figured out in their heads already.