$1.3 million in 15 minutes: They're the ones who will always make the money.

This week, as Bitcoin fell below $82,000 and market risk appetite cooled rapidly, the Base ecosystem witnessed a less-than-exciting but controversial experiment.

Base's head, Jesse Pollak, launched a creator token named $jesse, aiming to explore whether "the creator economy can form a new value mechanism on-chain."

Base's head, Jesse Pollak, launched a creator token named $jesse, intending to explore "whether the creator economy can form a new value mechanism on-chain.

However, the heated discussion in the market still stemmed from a familiar figure: two on-chain sniper bots were the first to complete the entire process of building up their positions and then selling off their holdings.

JESSE's original intention: to turn "personal brand value" into assets that can be jointly held

This is not the first time Pollak has caused controversy by issuing a token.

Since April 2025, he has been continuously experimenting with "content tokens" on his personal and official Base Zora accounts: On April 17, 2025, the official Base account posted a tweet saying "Base is for everyone," which was automatically minted into $BASE tokens. Within two hours, the market capitalization plummeted from $16.9 million to $1.3 million, a drop of 92%. Pollak later admitted to personally approving the post, calling it an "experiment," but it still raised suspicions of market manipulation. He subsequently minted tokens in batches from his daily tweets. Statistics show that 40% of the content tokens he minted experienced a drop of over 90%, with only 3 showing appreciation. While promoting content tokens, Pollak also attempted to build a "content token—creator token" narrative system on Zora. He repeatedly explored a core question: can the influence, attention, and works of creators form a more direct and sustainable value cycle on the blockchain? According to his vision, the path is very clear: creators tokenize their personal brands, fans become a "community of shared interests" by holding tokens, and creators use these proceeds to support their creative work, thus forming a closed loop. Pollak repeatedly emphasizes that $JESSE is a "cultural experiment," not an investment product—it sounds more like an artistic endeavor or social test than financial speculation. However, on-chain transaction mechanisms never change their rules for idealism. Once the experiment begins, it falls into a system far more sophisticated and ruthless than its designers imagined.

Sniper Bot Earns $1.3 Million in 15 Minutes

JESSE's issuance method adopted a "one-time liquidity injection" model:

• Total supply of 1 billion tokens;

• Of which 500 million tokens were directly injected into the liquidity pool;

• However, within the block where the injection occurred, 260 million tokens were instantly swept away by two snipers.

  According to data from Arkham Intelligence, the two snipers ultimately profited: $707,700 and $619,600 respectively, totaling over $1.3 million. One wallet's actions are particularly typical: It spent approximately 67 ETH (US$191,000) to buy 7.6% of the supply; paid over $44,000 in priority fees for ranking advantage; and sold all of it after a short-term surge, quickly increasing the value of the 67 ETH to 303. ETH,
  Profits exceeded $600,000 within minutes.

This is a "first come, first served" structure:

The moment ordinary users see the price chart, their profits have already been taken away.

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, these two seconds are further divided into multiple micro-blocks of 200 milliseconds each.

Nominally, Base produces a block every two seconds; but internally, these two seconds are further divided into multiple micro-blocks of 200 milliseconds each.

Whoever grabs the first microblock almost gains the upper hand in "risk-free arbitrage." In this structure, sniping is no longer a technical game, but a competition revolving around "speed + fee." Bots monitor contracts in advance and place orders immediately upon detecting liquidity injection; transactions bypass the public mempool and are sent directly to the sequencer via private channels; finally, they use high priority fees to secure their place in the order queue. A difference of 200 milliseconds can determine hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit, while ordinary users haven't even finished loading the price chart. This is the inherent bias of the Flashblocks structure—early birds have an absolute advantage, while ordinary participants are excluded from the profit range. Some community users pointed out that the project team shut down the personal profile acquisition interface on the website within the first minute of JESSE's launch (likely to prevent bots from automatically scraping information). However, this measure may have backfired: ordinary users needed this interface to obtain the contract address from the official website to purchase, while advanced snipers operated directly at the smart contract level, without needing to go through the website frontend. As a result, this measure only hindered ordinary users, while actually reducing competition for snipers. Earlier this year, Zora's BASE token also plummeted 90% from its high point within minutes of its launch. Now, JESSE has been targeted again, inevitably raising doubts: can the creator token experiment truly escape the shadow of arbitrage machines? As of writing, the JESSE token price has fallen 32.24% in the past 24 hours, with its total market capitalization dropping to $14.22 million. The 24-hour trading volume was $4.78 million, resulting in a trading volume-to-market-cap ratio as high as 33.6%. This ratio is significantly higher than normal, indicating a strong speculative atmosphere in the market and that funds are mainly used for short-term trading. Placing JESSE within a larger narrative framework reveals a clear divergence within the SocialFi sector during the bear market. Creator tokens are more like attention options, making it difficult to accumulate long-term value. A prime example is the now-defunct Friend.tech; other personal IP-based tokens face similar dilemmas: their value relies heavily on hype and sentiment, and once on-chain activity declines, buying interest almost immediately dries up. Conversely, infrastructure is receiving more "patient funding." Zora's platform token, ZORA, experienced strong growth after its Base App integration depth improved: the number of creators, minting volume, and total transaction volume all climbed simultaneously. The market is squeezing out emotional bubbles, and value judgments are shifting from chasing individual "attention assets" to valuing scalable "utility tools." JESSE's predicament lies precisely in this: creator tokens reliant on hype are inherently fragile because the market's "absorbing capacity" can never be sustained by short-term speculation.