There's an interesting trend happening on Ethereum right now. More and more decentralized exchange (DEX) trading volume is bypassing the public mempool and being sent directly to miners/builders through private channels to avoid being seen and exploited by others. This shows that DEXs are gradually maturing. If you go through the public mempool, for example, when you click 'swap' on a DEX, your transaction gets broadcast to Ethereum's public mempool, which is a waiting area visible to everyone. Meanwhile, MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) searchers monitor the mempool in real-time. If they spot a large transaction, they can front-run or sandwich attack the user. Getting sandwiched is super frustrating, and it increases slippage. In a sandwich attack, MEV predators insert two transactions around the user's trade. The first transaction buys the same token, driving up the price. The user's trade then executes in the middle, forced to buy at the inflated price. Immediately after, the second transaction sells the token, bringing the price back down and profiting from the difference. Mature DEXs mostly skip the public mempool. Good wallets or aggregators default to using private RPCs (like Flashbots Protect or Eden Network), so the user's transaction isn't broadcast to the public mempool. Instead, it's encrypted and sent directly to professional block builders. These builders receive private orders and often refund part of the MEV profits, so users avoid getting sandwiched. By 2025, large transactions in Ethereum's public mempool have become increasingly rare. So, what does this mean for regular users? Using a mature wallet/DEX with default RPC for swaps generally means you won't get sandwiched. Slippage and gas fees are much lower than in the previous cycle, and you might even get a partial MEV refund. However, small transactions (like under $1,000) might still end up in the public mempool since the MEV profit is relatively low. In just one cycle, Ethereum's DEX landscape has evolved from a public auction-style 'Wild West'—where whoever paid the most gas got their transaction included and sandwich attacks were rampant—to an era where more trades are routed through private channels, with the chance to get some rebates back.