When Jesse Pollak, creator of the Base blockchain, dropped his eponymous “Jesse” creator token on Thursday, two sharp traders were already lying in wait, spring-loaded to act before everyone else.

By the time other traders joined the market, the pair had carved out a combined $1.3 million in profit, turning Pollak’s token launch into yet another high-stakes race in crypto’s autobahn.

Onchain data from Arkham Intelligence shows how quickly they acted. As soon as liquidity for the Jesse token was seeded, the traders fired off buy transactions that scooped up more than half of the 500 million tokens made available.

Those transactions landed in the same block as the liquidity provision itself, the blockchain equivalent of stepping onto a shop floor at the exact moment the doors open. It’s called sniping, in crypto parlance, and it involves using bots or scripts to act the instant a new token becomes tradeable.

The asymmetry created by sniping is central to the drama around popular token launches. The Jesse token peaked at $25 million in market value but has since declined by 36% after the snipers sold their tokens.

Snipers route their transactions through private channels to bypass the public queue. That access doesn’t come cheap.

One sniper paid more than $44,000 in transaction fees. They invested $190,000 to buy Jesse tokens and sold them for $860,000 just 15 minutes later, securing $626,000 in profit.

On Thursday, Pollak said he launched the token to help remove some of the stigma around so-called creator coins, tokens tied to the personal brands of crypto celebrities.

Creator coins are part of the SocialFi meta, which has largely failed to gain momentum.

Pollak’s Base blockchain supports Zora, a protocol that enables users to launch creator coins.

While proponents like Pollak say these tokens help put ownership and control back in the hands of content creators, critics have panned them as no different from memecoins. In July, Sterling Crispin, an AI developer and researcher, called the market a hypercasino hellscape.

Trading volume for Jesse has crossed $25 million since the token’s launch and Pollak has used the fees collected as the liquidity provider to support other creator coins on Zora by buying their tokens.

“I will not stop supporting creators,” Pollak posted on X.

Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. Got a tip? Please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.