I’ve now seen people complaining about MEV jumping the queue for the third time. Honestly, I’ve always thought “fair ordering” sounds cool, but when you think it through, it feels a bit twisted—doesn’t front-running basically come down to who can run faster? The on-chain rules allow it, so you’re expected to follow them, but those small orders caught in sandwich attacks are pretty unfortunate. They were just trying to buy an NFT, yet ended up paying several times more in gas.

Recently, I’ve also found the Twitter back-and-forth about NFT royalties entertaining. Creators said their income dropped off a cliff, and blamed the poor liquidity in the secondary market on royalties being too high. In fact, MEV and royalties are both issues of ordering: one is about grabbing transaction ordering, and the other is about grabbing the ordering of fee collection. Anyway, whenever I play with small protocols now, I’ll first check whether there’s a mechanism to prevent sandwich attacks, so I don’t wake up in the middle of the night mad from slippage. That’s it for now—I’m going back to the raffle window.