I’m not very good at telling grand narratives, but on-chain this whole “who gets in line first, who gets filled” thing is pretty straightforward in how it affects ordinary people: you click confirm, thinking you’ll be filled at the price you see, but someone ahead of you wedges in—slippage instantly turns into a hidden reef, the fill price gets worse, and you might even get sandwiched into failure, wasting gas for nothing. The hardest part is you might not even be able to figure out what just happened, and can only blame “the chain isn’t working today.”

MEV isn’t all bad, either. Sometimes it’s smoothing out the price differences across different pools, or acting as a helpful liquidity courier… but when it turns into “queue-jumping charges,” the party most likely paying the bill is retail traders’ certainty: the same kind of action, sometimes good and sometimes bad, depending on whether you’re being watched/monitored and how the routing is done.

Recently, I’ve been seeing Layer2s arguing with each other about TPS, fees, and subsidies—anyway, what I care about more is the ordering rules and transaction predictability: whether it’s cheap by 0.01 or 100x faster, just don’t make it feel like every time I place an order, I’m rolling dice. For now, I try to split my orders, take less congested routes, and use limit orders whenever possible. Slower is fine, too. Let’s play it safe and steady.