MEV

Most write-ups about MEV focus on strategy: arbitrage, liquidations, sandwiching, backruns. Strategy is necessary, but it is not what separates a profitable searcher from a spectator. The deciding factor is usually time. By the time a pending transaction reaches you over a public RPC gateway, has been parsed, evaluated, and answered with a fresh state read across the network, the opportunity may already belong to someone closer to the chain. This post is about where those milliseconds go and how co-located node access closes the gap.