Lately, the MEV tricks I’ve been seeing on-chain are getting more and more surreal. Everyone is lining up and waiting for transactions, but some bots just cut in line—calling it “optimizing ordering.” To put it plainly, it’s just paying a bit of extra gas to take advantage of the honest folks. As a small retail trader like me, before I hit confirm, I keep checking the contract calls over and over, afraid of getting sandwiched. But honestly, you can defend against it for a while—you can’t stop those who can change the block order.

Recently, I’ve been watching a few testnets roll out incentives, and the points expectation hype is really heating up. Everyone’s guessing whether the mainnet will issue tokens—anyway, I’m not daring to chase it. What if it’s another phishing “doll-in-a-doll” scheme? My hardware wallet is just collecting dust; at least when I press the physical buttons, I feel a bit more at ease.

That’s it for now—back to building bricks.