Two blockchain snipers extracted more than $1.3 million in profits during the rollout of Base founder Jesse Pollak’s creator coin on Thursday, a rapid-fire trade made possible by the introduction of “flashblocks” on the Coinbase-backed layer-2 blockchain.
The release included 500 million JESSE tokens, half the total supply, being seeded into a liquidity pool. Within the same onchain block, buyers using automated software acquired 261.7 million tokens, according to Arkham Intelligence. The top two snipers walked away with profits of $707,700 and $619,600.
A sniper is a trader who deploys an algorithm to frontrun other trades when a new token is issued. The practice became common during the memecoin mania earlier this year. In this case, the sniper managed to purchase JESSE in the same block the token was issued.
One of the winning wallets spent around $191,000 to buy 7.6% of the supply and tipped the Base sequencer more than $44,000 in priority fees to land the trade before others. After selling their full allocation, the trader netted over $600,000 in profit.
According to pseudonymous analyst bheau, the mechanics behind the snipes stem from flashblocks, a Base feature rolled out in July. While Base has two-second block times, it now produces a series of 200-millisecond micro-blocks within each full block.
This allows bots to detect a token-deployment transaction the moment it appears in the first flashblock and submit high-fee buy orders that settle in the next flashblock, so both appear in the same on-chain block.
The result is “same-block” sniping without access to private mempool data, but enabled by micro-block visibility and fee-based ordering.
Pollak has pitched creator coins as a new alignment tool between creators and their audiences. “Paired together they create a flywheel that puts ownership, control, and upside back in the hands of creators and their followers,” he wrote earlier this week.
JESSE is currently trading at a $13.8 million FDV, with $4.4 million in liquidity and $33.5 million in trading volume, according to CoinMarketCap.