I don’t know if I’m just too sensitive, but lately when I look at those on-chain front-running transactions, they just feel like the kind of cutting in line in real life. Everyone is queuing, and yet somehow someone can see the cards in your hand ahead of time, then snatch the opportunity before you do. It’s pretty annoying, but honestly, it’s also a kind of “technology.”

I thought it over: at its core, MEV isn’t a technical problem—it’s a story about ordering rights. Whoever has the power to decide who trades first is forced to either accept or actively exploit that power. But the problem is that if the underlying “game rules” themselves are basically “who bids higher gets to go first,” then so-called fairness is pretty fragile—the harder the structure, the softer the story, right?

In those recent testnet incentive campaigns, points have been racking up like crazy, and everyone is speculating about whether the mainnet will issue tokens—like workers waiting for the year-end bonus. But after circling around, the bottom logic is still ordering rights in whose hands it is. I’m curious, I guess, but I’m not planning to bet on anything—I just want to see what kind of weird things might grow out of it. Think it through slowly; I don’t know if it’s right or not.