Two flashblock snipers net $1.3 million during JESSE token launch

Two blockchain snipers made more than $1.3 million in profits during the rollout of Base founder Jesse Pollak’s creator coin. According to reports, the two exploited  Base’s new “flashblocks” system during the launch on Thursday.

The release included 500 million JESSE tokens, half the total supply, being seeded into a liquidity pool. According to Arkham Intelligence, within the same on-chain block, buyers using automated software acquired 261.7 million tokens. The top two snipers walked away with profits of $707,700 and $619,600.

Sniper multiplies his ETH holdings

One of the winning wallets spent approximately 67 ETH, translating to $191,000, to buy 7.6% of the supply. They also tipped the Base sequencer more than $44,000 in priority fees to land the trade before others. After selling their full allocation, the trader converted 67 ETH into 303 ETH in minutes, resulting in a profit of over $600,000.

Sniper trading began to happen frequently during the memecoin craze earlier this year. According to analysts, the mechanics behind the snipes stem from flashblocks, a Base feature rolled out in July. While Base has two-second block times, it now produces a series of 200-millisecond micro-blocks within each full block.

This allows bots to detect a token-deployment transaction the moment it appears in the first flashblock and submit high-fee buy orders that settle in the next flashblock. To that end, both appear in the same on-chain block.

The result is “same-block” sniping without access to private mempool data, but enabled by micro-block visibility and fee-based ordering. In this case, the JESSE token’s snipers were able to buy JESSE in the same block that the token was released.

Meanwhile, JESSE has seen a 40% decline in the last 24 hours. The token is currently trading at a $177k FDV, with 69k in trading volume and an underwhelming 179k in market cap. 

Authorities’ efforts to deal with insider trading 

As reported by Cryptopolitan, when the crypto community, which had followed Pollak’s previous involvement with so-called “content coins,” asked the Base creator why they should trust creator-led tokens, he made a distinction between the types of tokens. He stated that “content coins” are for short-term use and “creator coins” have a lasting worth tied to a creator’s work.

However, due to the snipping, the community is calling this insider trading. One X user has said, “I’m just genuinely curious […]They also disabled the profile fetching api on their website at the very first minute of the launch (as a countermeasure, I presume), but wouldn’t this just mess up regular users just trying to get the CA from the website, and help the snipers?”

“Since they are doing it at the contract level? I’m low-key starting to think at this point it’s in-house snipping and that’s why they don’t want to fix the issue,” he added.

Meanwhile, authorities are paying more attention to the so-called insider trading. Japan is preparing a major reset of its crypto rulebook, moving to treat digital assets as financial products subject to insider trading laws.

The plan brings market conduct rules familiar to equity traders into crypto. People with non-public information tied to issuers or exchanges would be barred from trading on material events like listings, delistings, or bankruptcies before they are disclosed.

Additionally, US prosecutors unveiled charges against eight men accused of belonging to a global network that made tens of millions of dollars trading on inside information about the finances and merger plans of numerous companies for years.

Prosecutors stated that Khouadja, Safi, and Ge recruited investment bankers and other corporate insiders to provide them with confidential information about various publicly traded companies. 

They also recruited other traders in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, to trade on the information they received in exchange for a share of their insider trading profits, prosecutors said.

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