Transaction ordering can change your result
Understand arbitrage, liquidations and sandwiching before increasing slippage.
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Start with: liquidity, smart contract, liquidation.
Maximal extractable value, or MEV, is value obtainable through transaction inclusion, exclusion or ordering beyond ordinary block rewards and fees. The actors and transaction-distribution mechanisms differ between networks.
Why order matters
If two trades affect the same pool, the second can face a different price. Searchers may compete to arbitrage price differences, execute eligible liquidations or exploit the movement caused by someone else's trade.
In a sandwich, an actor places a trade before yours and another after it, seeking to profit from the price movement around your order. A wide minimum-output tolerance can leave more room for a poor execution. Tight tolerance can instead make transactions fail when prices move.
A concrete check
Your quote is 100 output units and your minimum is 95. You have authorized a range of acceptable outcomes down to 95, not guaranteed yourself 100. That difference can include market movement, price impact and ordering effects. Raising tolerance simply to make a trade succeed changes the risk you accept.
note — Minimum output is a protection boundary, not a prediction. Before swapping, review it with the other checks in Swap tokens with a defined minimum output.
Private submission or protected routing may reduce public exposure but introduces dependence on the provider's behavior, availability and coverage. It is not a guarantee against every unfavorable trade.
Compare execution routes, liquidity depth, fees and minimum output. If the expected cost is hard to explain, pause. Splitting a trade can change impact but also creates more fees and opportunities for prices to change; it is not automatically better.
MEV is a useful risk concept, not an invitation to run extraction strategies before understanding transaction execution.