$1.3 million in 15 minutes, the ones who always profit are always them

In the week when Bitcoin fell below $82,000 and market risk appetite cooled rapidly, the Base ecosystem ushered in an experiment that wasn’t lively, but was full of controversy.

Jesse Pollak, head of Base, launched a creator token named after himself, $jesse, aiming to explore “whether the creator economy can form a new value mechanism on-chain.”

However, the heated market discussion still comes from familiar figures: two on-chain sniping bots were the first to complete the entire process of building and selling positions.

The Original Intention of JESSE: Turning “Personal Brand Value” Into a Co-owned Asset

This isn’t the first time Pollak has sparked controversy by issuing a token. Since April 2025, he has continuously conducted “content coin” experiments on his personal and Base official Zora accounts:

April 17, 2025: The official Base account posted “Base is for everyone,” which was automatically minted as the $BASE token. Its market cap plummeted from $16.9 million to $1.3 million within two hours, a 92% drop. Pollak later admitted to personally approving the post, calling it an “experiment,” but still faced market manipulation accusations.

He subsequently minted daily tweets into coins in bulk. Statistics show that among the content coins he minted, 40% fell by more than 90%, and only 3 appreciated in value.

While promoting content coins, Pollak also tried to build a “content coin—creator coin” narrative on Zora. He repeatedly explored a core proposition: can a creator’s influence, attention, and works form a more direct and sustainable value loop on-chain?

According to his vision, the path is very clear: creators tokenize their personal brand, fans become a “community of interest” by holding the token, and creators use the proceeds to feed back into their creative work, thus forming a closed loop.

Pollak has repeatedly emphasized that $JESSE is a “cultural experiment,” not an investment product—sounding more like an artistic act or a social test than financial speculation.

However, on-chain trading mechanisms never change the rules for idealism. Once the experiment starts, it falls into a system that is far more precise—and ruthless—than the designer could imagine.

Sniping Bots Earned $1.3 Million in 15 Minutes

JESSE used a “one-time liquidity injection” issuance model:

• Total supply: 1 billion tokens;
• 500 million directly injected into the liquidity pool;
• In the very block of injection, 260 million were instantly sniped by two traders.

According to Arkham Intelligence data, these two snipers ultimately profited:

• $707,700
• $619,600

A total of over $1.3 million.

One wallet’s operation was particularly typical:

• Spent about 67 ETH ($191,000) to buy 7.6% of the supply;
• Paid over $44,000 in priority fees to gain sorting advantage;
• After a short spike, sold all holdings, turning 67 ETH into 303 ETH,
  making over $600,000 in a few minutes.

This is a “first to the finish line wins” structure:
By the time ordinary users see the price chart, the profits are already gone.

The core reason for this result lies in Base’s flashblocks mechanism launched in July.

Nominally, Base produces a block every two seconds; but internally, each two seconds is split into multiple microblocks of about 200 milliseconds each. Whoever grabs the first microblock almost has “risk-free arbitrage” first-mover advantage.

In this structure, sniping is no longer a technical contest but a competition of “speed + fees.” Bots monitor contracts in advance, and as soon as a liquidity injection is detected, they instantly place orders; transactions are routed through private channels directly to the sequencer, bypassing the public mempool; finally, a high priority fee is used to win the order. A 200-millisecond difference is enough to decide hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit, while ordinary users haven’t even loaded the price chart yet.

Therefore, JESSE’s trajectory was locked from the very first second: a rapid spike, followed by a sharp drop of more than 30% after the snipers sold off.

This is the natural bias of the flashblocks structure—front-runners have an absolute advantage, while ordinary participants are excluded from the profit zone.

Some community members sharply pointed out: the project team disabled the profile API on the website in the first minute after JESSE went live (possibly to prevent bots from scraping info). But this measure may have had the opposite effect: ordinary users needed this API to get the contract address from the official website to buy, but advanced snipers operated directly on the smart contract layer and didn’t need the website frontend at all. As a result, this measure only hindered ordinary users and actually reduced competition for snipers.

Earlier this year, the BASE token minted by Zora also crashed by 90% from its peak within minutes of launch. Now that JESSE has been sniped again, it’s hard not to wonder: can the creator token experiment ever truly escape the shadow of arbitrage machines?

At the time of writing, the JESSE token price has dropped 32.24% in the past 24 hours, with a total market cap falling to $14.22 million. The 24-hour trading volume is $4.78 million, and the trading volume to market cap ratio is as high as 33.6%. This ratio is significantly higher than normal, indicating a strong speculative atmosphere in the market, with capital mainly engaged in short-term trading.

SocialFi in a Bear Market

Putting JESSE into a broader narrative shows that the SocialFi sector is undergoing clear differentiation during the bear market. Creator tokens are more like attention options and are difficult to form long-term value accumulation.

A typical case is the now-faded Friend.tech; other personal IP tokens face similar dilemmas: their value depends more on hype and sentiment, and once on-chain activity drops, buying interest dries up almost instantly.

On the contrary, infrastructure is attracting more “patient capital.”

Zora’s platform token, ZORA, saw strong growth after deeper integration with the Base App—creators, mint volume, and total trading volume all climbed simultaneously.

This signals that the market is squeezing out emotional bubbles, with value judgments shifting from pursuing individual “attention assets” back to prioritizing scalable “utility tools.” This is the dilemma JESSE faces: creator tokens that rely on hype are inherently fragile, because market “absorption” can never be sustained by fleeting speculation.