Just saw more people hyping modular blockchains and DA-layer narratives. Developers are absolutely thrilled, while users look completely lost—honestly, these days it’s already pretty good if you can figure out who cut in line with your transactions. Why worry about data availability?

MEV, put simply, is the on-chain right to cut in line. Some people are willing to spend gas to jump ahead; others get sandwiched for no reason at all. Ethereum’s ordering rules, basically, are: the highest bidder wins. Fair? The ordering right itself has never been fairly distributed—voting power, validators, MEV bots, nested layer after layer. In the end, it’s still retail users who end up paying. You say you’re running a smart contract, but the other party runs it before you—so you lose and they profit. This isn’t a technical issue; it’s a game-theory issue.

The more transparent the ordering rules are, the lower the cost of cutting in line—but the more transparent they are, the easier it is to arbitrage. It’s pretty ironic: decentralization wants fairness, but what “fairness” means has never been a technical problem—it’s a governance problem. Who knows whether the next fork will reshuffle the ordering rights, or whether MEV will be turned into a kind of extractable tax. Anyway, I’m not optimistic about this “whoever has money cuts in line” style of play. For now, that’s it.