Recently, I’ve seen plenty of people talking about MEV front-running and queue-jumping. Honestly, retail users really feel quite wronged. You spend a lot of effort researching a trade, and then a bot or a validator swoops in and takes it—your slippage is outrageously high, or your profit gets eaten outright by a sandwich attack. So does this count as an invisible on-chain “toll booth”? Anyway, after playing DeFi for the past few years, I’m increasingly convinced that transaction ordering fairness is a false premise—so long as someone can decide the transaction order, the profits will inevitably tilt in that direction.

But I’ve also slowly come to terms with it. Rather than complaining, it’s better to adjust my strategy. When I trade or do arbitrage now, I deliberately avoid peak gas wars time windows and choose pools with relatively more dispersed liquidity or slightly less popular ones, or I use some privacy transaction tools (like Flashbots’ mev-share). At the very least, it reduces the probability of being “watched.” In plain terms: don’t fight the machines for food—change your posture and breathe.

Also, I recently saw data saying that MEV’s share in validator revenue is getting higher and higher, and that retail users are basically exposed in the public mempool. Looking long term, I think the ordering design on L2s or new public chains might be fairer—but who knows? For now, that’s it. I’ll keep observing.