Two blockchain snipers extracted more than $1.3 million in profits Thursday from deploying Base founder Jesse Pollak’s creation coin, a rapid exchange 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, 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 speed up other transactions when a new token is issued. The practice became common during memecoin mania earlier this year. In this case, the sniper managed to purchase JESSE in the same block where 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 the others. After selling his entire allocation, the trader made a profit of over $600,000.
According to pseudonymous analyst Bheau, the mechanics behind snipes come from flashblocks, a core feature rolled out in July. While Base has block times of two seconds, it now produces a series of 200 millisecond micro-blocks in each full block.
This allows bots to detect a token deployment transaction the moment it appears in the first flashblock and submit expensive buy orders that are settled in the next flashblock, so that both appear in the same on-chain block.
The result is “in the same block” sniping without access to private memory pool data, but enabled by micro-block visibility and paid ordering.
Pollak introduced creator plays as a new tool for alignment between creators and their audiences. “Together, they create a flywheel that puts ownership, control, and benefit back in the hands of creators and their subscribers,” 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.
