Two blockchain snipers extracted more than $1.3 million in profits during the launch of Base founder Jesse Pollak’s creator coin on Thursday, a rapid exchange made possible by the introduction of “flashblocks” to the Coinbase-backed Layer 2 blockchain.
The launch included 500 million JESSE tokens, half of the total supply, being seeded into a liquidity pool. Within the same on-chain block, buyers using automated software purchased 261.7 million tokens, according to Arkham Intelligence. The top two sharpshooters took home winnings of $707,700 and $619,600.
A sniper is a trader who implements an algorithm to preempt 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 in which the token was issued.
One of the winning wallets spent around $191,000 to buy 7.6% of the supply and gave the Base sequencer more than $44,000 in priority fees to make the trade before others. After selling his entire allocation, the trader made over $600,000 in profits.
According to pseudonymous analyst Bheau, the mechanics behind sniping come from flashblocks, a core feature released 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 they both appear in the same on-chain block.
The result is a “same block” sniper without access to private mempool data, but enabled by microblock visibility and rate-based ordering.
Pollak has introduced creator coins as a new alignment tool between creators and their audiences. “Together they create a flywheel that returns ownership, control and benefits to creators and their followers,” he wrote earlier this week.
JESSE is currently trading at an FDV of $13.8 million, with $4.4 million in liquidity and $33.5 million in trading volume, according to CoinMarketCap.
