Recently, I keep hearing people talk about block builders and bundles, as if if retail investors don’t understand, they’ll get “eaten”… I really don’t think it’s necessary to push yourself to become a researcher. Just know: when you sign and send a transaction once, it doesn’t necessarily get into a block in the order you see; it might be bundled, front-run, or rerouted; a bundle is basically packaging a series of operations together and handing them to the builder, reducing the chance of being front-run or broken apart, but it’s also more like “handing your fate over to an intermediary.”

For retail investors, the essentials are probably three things: don’t give unlimited permissions recklessly; don’t keep switching contracts for “higher yields” just because you see better returns; try to use reliable front-ends or routing for on-chain operations, and avoid signing a bunch of incomprehensible calldata on unfamiliar sites. Now, with the stacking of yields from staking and shared security, being criticized as “circular” or “nested,” I’ve become more cautious: the more layers, the more signatures and permissions involved, and if something goes wrong, you won’t even know which link leaked.

What I regret isn’t the outcome, but that I didn’t remove permissions when it was inconvenient, and I thought I understood it pretty well. Anyway, I’d rather earn less now than gamble on luck in the MEV/builder chain.