I was watching the mempool on a small “shitcoin” chain last night, and suddenly I noticed that transactions kept getting “cut in line.” I clicked pretty fast, but when the gas was just slightly lower, I watched several extra transactions ahead of me go through and got pushed behind them directly.

When I first started playing on-chain, I was really mad. It didn’t seem fair—why would someone “overtake” in the queue? Later I looked into MEV and the sorters and finally understood that on-chain, it’s not really a “first come, first served” logic. It’s more like an auction—whoever pays higher gas gets executed first. Bottom line: what we think of as “fairness” is queue fairness; what’s actually played on-chain is capital fairness.

Recently, the staking unlocks and token unlock calendar have been getting spammed everywhere, and everyone’s worried about sell pressure. I feel like instead of stressing out about that, you should think about how to reduce the probability of being “trampled” by using batch timing and time allocation to create room in the narrow gap where “cut-in” behavior happens. Plant your position slowly—don’t rush to all-in. After all, you can’t be as fast as those robots.