I spent half the night digging through a bunch of on-chain data, and suddenly I feel like talking about sandwiches.

Honestly, when retail investors see they’ve been sandwiched, their first reaction is usually to curse MEV for front-running and blame robots. But, to put it plainly, this is basically a public auction in a trading market for ordering—if your gas is low, others can jump the line and eat your slippage. If you don’t understand it or can’t be bothered to adjust slippage and gas settings, then the fee ends up being earned by someone else; from a technical logic standpoint, that’s pretty fair.

The only thing I think is worth complaining about is that these days, all kinds of L2s and block builders are getting more and more centralized. In validators/miners’ income, the share coming from legitimate block rewards and transaction fees is getting smaller and smaller—yet they end up getting rich off “ordering privileges.” Retail investors are left with just one line: “I’m done with this round”… But what can you do? On-chain public transparency also has a cost: if you want fairness, it may be slower; if you want it fast, you have to accept being cut in line.

Anyway, my style right now is: for orders with bigger amounts, split them into several batches, tip well, or manually speed them up near the block boundary—there’s really only that much you can do. The thinking is still the old thinking; the only thing that changed is that the opponent is now code and bots.