Recently, I saw a bunch of new L1/L2 incentives to boost TVL again, and old users in the group complained about "mining, selling, and taking profits." I can really empathize with that... Honestly, many "opportunities" on the chain are just a matter of thinking you're picking up money, but actually you're paying others' transaction fees.

Now I prefer to think of sandwich attacks and arbitrage as more like "cutting in line at the marketplace." You go to pay (initiate a swap) with your groceries, and someone pushes past you to buy first, raising the price; you can only complete the transaction at a higher price; then they sell back to you afterward to profit from the spread. What you see is a single transaction, but they see a gap in the queue.

My own approach is pretty timid: I stick to aggregators when I can, set small slippage, and if I’m not confident, split the trades into several smaller ones to slowly swap. Cross-chain is even more obvious—when the path gets complicated, each "bridge/pool" in the middle can become a place where others reach out to grab a share... Anyway, don’t treat every on-chain fluctuation as a gift.