This article is reprinted with permission from Bitpush, and the copyright belongs to the original author.

In the week when Bitcoin fell below $82,000 and market risk appetite rapidly cooled, the Base ecosystem welcomed a not-so-bustling yet controversial experiment.

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

However, the heat of discussion in the market still came from familiar figures: two on-chain sniper bots were the first to complete the entire process of building positions and selling off.

The original intention of JESSE: to turn "personal brand value" into a collectively owned asset.

This is not Pollak's first controversy over issuing tokens. Since April 2025, he has been continuously conducting "content token" experiments on his personal and Base's official Zora accounts:

On April 17, 2025: The official Base account tweeted "Base is for everyone," which was automatically minted into the $BASE token, with a market cap plummeting from $16.9 million to $1.3 million within two hours, a drop of 92%. Pollak later admitted to personally approving the post, calling it an "experiment," but it still raised questions of market manipulation.

He subsequently minted daily tweets into tokens in bulk. Statistics show that 40% of the minted content tokens fell by over 90%, with only three appreciating in value.

While promoting content tokens, Pollak also attempted to build a narrative system of "content tokens - creator tokens" 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-chain?

According to his vision, the path is very clear: creators will tokenize their personal brands, fans will become "stakeholders" by holding tokens, and creators will use this income to support their creations, thus forming a closed loop.

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

However, on-chain trading mechanisms do not change rules due to idealism. Once the experiment starts, it falls into a system that is far more intricate and ruthless than the designers imagined.

Sniper bots made $1.3 million in 15 minutes.

The issuance method of JESSE adopted a "one-time liquidity injection" model:

Total supply of 1 billion tokens;

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

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

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

$707,700

$619,600

Totaling 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 ordering advantage;

After a short-term spike, sold everything, rapidly increasing 67 ETH to 303 ETH, making over $600,000 in profit within minutes.

This is a "run and win" structure:

By the time ordinary users see the price chart, the profits have already been extracted.

The core reason for this outcome lies in the flashblocks mechanism that Base launched in July.

Nominally, Base produces a block every two seconds; however, internally, these two seconds are split into multiple micro-blocks of around 200 milliseconds. Whoever can grab the first micro-block almost holds the key to "risk-free arbitrage."

In this structure, sniping is no longer a technical game but a competition around "speed + fees." Bots listen to contracts in advance, and once they detect liquidity injection, they place orders instantly;

Transactions bypass the public mempool and go directly to the sequencer through private channels;

Finally, they use high priority fees to seize ordering. A 200-millisecond difference can determine profits of hundreds of thousands of dollars, while ordinary users haven't even finished loading the price chart.

This is the natural tilt brought by the flashblocks structure—runners have an absolute advantage, while ordinary participants are excluded from the profit range.

Some community users sharply pointed out: the project team closed the personal profile access interface on the website within the first minute of JESSE's launch (possibly 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 make purchases, while advanced snipers operated directly at the smart contract level, not needing to go through the website front end. The result is that this measure only hindered ordinary users and reduced competition for snipers.

Earlier this year, the BASE token minted by Zora also plummeted 90% from its peak within minutes of launch. Now, with JESSE being sniped again, it inevitably raises doubts: can the experiment of creator tokens truly escape the shadow of arbitrage machines?

As of the time of writing, the price of the JESSE token has dropped 32.24% in the past 24 hours, with a total market cap falling back to $14.22 million and a 24-hour trading volume of $4.78 million, with a trading volume to market cap ratio as high as 33.6%. This ratio is significantly above normal levels, indicating a strong speculative atmosphere in the market, with funds primarily focused on short-term trading.

SocialFi in a bear market.

Placing JESSE within a larger narrative framework reveals that the SocialFi track is showing clear differentiation in the bear market. Creator tokens resemble attention options, making it difficult to form long-term value accumulation.

A typical case is the already defunct Friend.tech; other personal IP tokens face similar dilemmas: their value relies more on trends and emotions, and once on-chain activity declines, buying pressure almost immediately evaporates.

In contrast, infrastructure is gaining more "patient capital."

Zora's platform token ZORA has seen strong growth after the Base App's integration deepened: the number of creators, minting volume, and total transaction volume have all risen simultaneously.

The market is squeezing out emotional bubbles, with value judgments shifting from chasing individual "attention assets" back to valuing scalable "utility tools." The dilemma of JESSE lies here: creator tokens that rely on hype are inherently fragile because the market's "absorption capacity" can never be sustained by fleeting speculation.

Related: The death cross confirmation of Bitcoin may indicate that BTC has officially entered a bear market.

Original article: “$1.3 million in 15 minutes, who always wins?”

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