Understanding gas price and max priority fee

Question

I was checking numerous tokens and buy transactions and there is a thing about gas price that I cannot understand.

So for instance, how is it possible that two transactions that happened in the same block, the first one had gas price of 70 and second had gas price of 161. And thinking about it, first thing that comes to mind that second transaction should be the first one validated, because of way higher gas price.

But that's not what happened, these are the transactions: First transaction, Second transaction. And my question is, how is this possible that the second transaction didn't frontrun the first one? How to find the "best" possible gas price that allows for that. I also checked the validator for the block and it looks like it was MEV validator, I am not sure if it matters here, but if it does, I would like to know more about it.

Answer 1

Well, as you can see, the second transaction's Max Priority Fee is higher than the first one, but it is confirmed later than the first one. It is because, the first one pays the higher transaction fee than second one. The formula is like this.

Transaction fee = Gas Usage * Gas Price Gas Price = Base Gas Fee + Max Priority Fee > Max Fee ? Base Gas Fee + Max Priority Fee : Max Fee

So even the Max Priority Fee is high, if the transaction assumes little gas price so that the transaction fee is small then, the transaction can be confirmed later.

Hope this can helpful for you.