Recently, I’ve been looking at a swap route again. The more I break it down, the more I get reminded of the whole thing about “queue jumping.” Put simply, MEV isn’t something that’s conjured out of thin air. More often than not, it’s your slippage in that one trade, combined with the price changes across those few pools, that gets someone else to slip in ahead of you / squeeze you in—so your execution gets worse, and the pool’s LPs also have a chunk of a price path that would have happened naturally siphoned off.

What’s hardest to bear isn’t really “someone is making money,” but rather who is footing the bill for ordering. Big users are obviously the ones who feel it, and small users aren’t unaffected either—it’s just that the impact gets diluted into those small, fragmented experiences like “why does it always feel like I got a bit less than expected.” Recently, new L1/L2s have been stirring up incentives to grow TVL. I can understand why old users are complaining about “extract-the-profit and sell-it”—once the traffic comes in, the bots get denser, ordering gets more cutthroat, and ordinary people end up feeling like they’re being pushed along in a crowded line.

As for me, I’m trying to use more conservative slippage and take fewer route hops. I’d rather miss out on a slightly better execution than leave too much room for being targeted… After all, when it comes to on-chain fairness, just talking about it isn’t enough—you have to start by looking at who this transaction actually passes through.