Two blockchain snipers raked in more than $1.3 million in profits during the rollout of Base founder Jesse Pollak’s creator coin on Thursday, a brisk trade made possible by the introduction of “flashblocks” on the Coinbase-backed layer-2 blockchain.
The release included 500 million JESSE tokens, half of 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 implements an algorithm to pre-empt other trades when a new token is issued. This practice became common during the memecoin craze earlier this year. In this case, the sniper managed to buy JESSE in the same block that the token was issued.
One of the winning wallets spent about $191,000 to buy 7.6% of the supply and gave the Base sequencer more than $44,000 in priority fees to land the trade before others. After selling their full allocation, the trader made over $600,000 in profit.
According to the pseudonymous analyst bheau, the mechanics behind the snaps come from flashblocks, a base feature launched in July. While Base has two-second block times, it now produces a series of 200-millisecond microblocks within each full block.
This allows bots to detect a token deployment transaction the moment it appears in the first flash block and submit buy orders with high fees that are settled in the next flash block so that both appear in the same on-chain block.
The result is “same block” sniping without access to private mempool data, but enabled by microblock visibility and fee-based ordering.
Pollak has launched creator coins as a new customization tool between creators and their audience. “Paired together, they create a flywheel that puts ownership, control and ups and downs 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.
