Recently, several new L1/L2s have rolled out incentive programs, and TVL has been climbing like crazy. As a result, old users are all complaining about “mining, extracting, and selling.” Honestly, I can understand this move— but what makes me want to roll my eyes even more is those big whale machines that “cut the line” to eat MEV. Just as the project team issues tokens and the swap liquidity goes through huge swings, they charge ahead in one go, sandwiching trades—while retail traders can’t even get a sip.

So who’s the biggest loser in this round? Not the project team, not the scientists—it's the ordinary users who just wait there, dumbly, for transaction confirmations. On-chain “fairness” has been shouted 800 times, yet ordering rights aren’t transparent and private pools are prioritized. In plain terms, all the “line-cutting fees” are ultimately paid for by retail traders.

Anyway, I feel like if they truly want to be fair, they should either do pre-emptive ordering like Arbitrum, or simply refund the MEV tax back to users. Otherwise, in “mine-extract-sell,” the biggest “extract” ends up being the toll fees that MEV secretly collects from the road.