Base e the Creator Token Paradox: When Snipers Always Win

As Bitcoin drops below $82,000 and market sentiment cools significantly, the Base blockchain hosted an event that exemplifies the current contradictions of the SocialFi ecosystem. Jesse Pollak, head of Base, launched the $JESSE token intending to explore how the value of personal branding could transform into a shareable blockchain asset. However, what happened in the following 15 minutes tells a completely different story: two specialized sniping bots captured $1.3 million before any ordinary trader could even load the price chart.

The Architecture of the Experiment: From Content Coin to JESSE

The path leading to JESSE began months earlier. Pollak is no stranger to controversial initiatives: since April 2025, he has actively experimented with “content coins” both personally and through Base’s official Zora channel. The Base experiment saw the $BASE token plummet 92% in two hours—from a market cap of $16.9 million to $1.3 million—despite Pollak describing it as a “cultural test.” He later tokenized his daily tweets massively via Zora, resulting in 40% of these content coins losing over 90% of their initial value.

This methodology aimed at an ambitious goal: to verify whether influence, attention, and creativity of creators could generate more direct and sustainable value cycles. The theoretical narrative was convincing: creators tokenize their brand, fans become holders and community participants, proceeds fund subsequent creative production. Pollak insisted that $JESSE represented a cultural experiment rather than a financial product—almost a social artwork rather than a speculation. But on-chain trading mechanisms operate under very different logics from idealism.

How Two Bots Extracted $1.3 Million in 15 Minutes

JESSE’s distribution model had a vulnerable structure: 1 billion total tokens, with 500 million injected directly into the liquidity pool. In the same block, two snipers acquired 260 million tokens. According to Arkham Intelligence data, the gains were $707,700 and $619,600 respectively, totaling over $1.3 million.

One operation is particularly significant: a wallet spent 67 ETH ($191,000) to accumulate 7.6% of the supply, paid over $44,000 in priority fees to gain transaction priority advantage, and subsequently sold everything when the price rose, converting the 67 ETH into 303 ETH—a profit of over $600,000 in minutes.

Flash Blocks and the Mechanics of Injustice

The root of the distortion lies in the flash blocks mechanism that Base launched in July. Although Base formally produces a block every two seconds, internally these two seconds are divided into micro-blocks of 200 milliseconds. The first micro-block holder gains an almost deterministic advantage of “risk-free arbitrage.”

In this architecture, sniping is no longer purely a matter of technical skill but of speed combined with high fees. Bots monitor smart contracts in advance; as soon as they detect liquidity injection, they immediately send orders through private channels directly to the sequencer, bypassing the public mempool; they use maximum priority fees to secure execution priority.

A 200-millisecond difference can mean tens of thousands of dollars. Ordinary users are still waiting for the price to load on their screens.

Paradoxically, a defensive move by the team—closing the API for the personal profile within the first minute after launch—exacerbated the effect. Ordinary users depended on that API to get the contract address from the website and participate; advanced snipers operated directly at the smart contract level, completely independent of the front-end. The result was to reduce competition for bots, not to protect against them.

ZORA and the Forking of the SocialFi Sector

Placing JESSE in the broader blockchain context reveals an interesting phenomenon. The SocialFi sector shows a marked bifurcation: creator tokens increasingly resemble options on temporary attention rather than tools of lasting value. Friend.tech epitomizes this failure; other personality-linked tokens face similar issues—their value mainly depends on emotional hype, and when on-chain activity diminishes, demand almost instantly vanishes.

At the same time, infrastructures are attracting increasing amounts of “patient capital.” The Zora platform, with its ZORA token ( currently trading at $0.04 with a flow market cap of $133.84M), has seen robust growth after deeper integration with Base App. The number of creators, minted tokens, and total transaction volume have all increased simultaneously. This sharply contrasts with the intrinsic fragility of creator tokens dependent on hype.

Structural Fragility

The price of the JESSE token fell 32.24% in the 24 hours following, with a market cap of $14.22 million and a trading volume of $4.78 million. The volume-to-market cap ratio of 33.6%—significantly higher than normal benchmarks—reveals strong speculative sentiment and prevalence of short-term trading.

The fundamental difficulty of JESSE and similar experiments lies here: creator tokens mainly supported by hype are inherently fragile because the market’s “absorption capacity” can never be maintained by short-term speculation. The market is performing a selection: emotional bubbles deflate, while the judgment of value returns to converging on “useful tools” that are scalable rather than on “personal attention assets.” As long as flash blocks and private channels continue to operate as they do today, experiments like this will be vulnerable to the same outcome: first come, first served, and others don’t even make it to the party.