Snipers made $1.3 million on Jesse Pollak $JESSE debut on Base

The rollout on Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025 seeded 500 million JESSE – half of the total supply – into a liquidity pool. Within that block, automated buyers amassed 261.7 million tokens, according to Arkham Intelligence. The top two wallets realized profits of $707,700 and $619,600, respectively.

In market slang, a “sniper” uses algorithms to priority‑queue transactions at launch and capture inventory before most traders can react. The tactic proliferated during this year’s memecoin wave. In this instance, one winning wallet spent ~$191,000 to buy ~7.6% of supply and tipped the Base sequencer more than $44,000 in priority fees to secure placement. After exiting the entire position, the trader cleared $600,000+ in gains.

The mechanics hinge on flashblocks, a Base capability introduced in July. While Base finalizes blocks roughly every two seconds, each full block now comprises a sequence of ~200‑millisecond micro‑blocks. As pseudonymous analyst bheau explains, bots can detect a token‑deployment transaction as soon as it lands in the first flashblock, then immediately submit high‑fee buy orders that settle in the next flashblock – so both the creation and the purchase appear within the same finalized block. That enables “same‑block” sniping without access to a private mempool, driven by micro‑block visibility and fee‑based ordering.

Pollak has framed creator coins as an 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. The Coinbase‑backed layer‑2 has pitched Base App as a hub for these on‑chain experiments.

As of publication, JESSE was trading at an $13.8 million FDV, with about $4.4 million in liquidity and $33.5 million in 24‑hour volume, according to CoinMarketCap. The episode is likely to renew debate over whether micro‑block architectures advantage sophisticated bots at the expense of retail users – and what mitigations, if any, networks or front‑ends should adopt at launch.

As GNCrypto wrote previously, on Nov. 19, 2025 Base co‑founder Jesse Pollak confirmed his personal creator token – $JESSE (styled as $jesse) – would launch on the Base App from his account jesse.base.eth, warning of likely impersonation and phishing. He told users to rely only on his verified X profile and Base App handle for updates and to double‑check links and contracts. Community reaction was mixed, and on Nov. 20 Wu Blockchain amplified the phishing warning and pointed to the official accounts to follow.