A new token adds its first liquidity pool, and within the same block, a chunk of its supply is already gone. The price chart looks like it started mid flight. If you have ever watched a brand new token on Base and wondered how anyone could possibly have bought in that fast, the answer is usually the same: they did not. A script did.
This guide explains what sniper bots are, how they manage to act that quickly, how that mechanic works differently on a chain like Base that has no public mempool, and what it actually means for someone who just wants to decide whether a new token is worth buying.
What a sniper bot actually does
A sniper bot is software built to buy a token the instant it becomes tradeable, often within the same block that liquidity is first added to a pool. Instead of a person opening an app, finding the token, and tapping swap, the bot has already done all of that preparation in advance. It is watching the chain continuously, and it is configured to fire a transaction the moment a specific condition is met, usually the creation of a new liquidity pool for a token it has been told to watch.
The appeal for whoever runs the bot is straightforward. The earliest buyers in a new pool get the lowest price along the pool's curve, before normal demand has had a chance to push it up. If a bot can be first, or among the first, it can buy at that low starting price and often sell shortly after into the demand that follows, sometimes within the same block or the next few.
How this works without a public mempool
On networks like Ethereum mainnet, classic sniping leans on the mempool, the public waiting room where pending transactions sit before they are confirmed. A bot can watch that queue, spot a liquidity add transaction before it lands, and race to get its own buy ordered right after it.
Base does not have a public mempool in that sense. Our guide to why Base doesn't have a mempool covers this in detail, but the short version is that transactions go to a sequencer rather than sitting in an open, visible queue that outside parties can watch and react to before it confirms.
That does not make sniping impossible on Base, it just changes the mechanics. A bot does not need to see a pending transaction coming if it can react fast enough once one has already landed. Base builds and streams partial block updates roughly every 200 milliseconds through Flashblocks, and a bot watching for a new pool creation event can see it that quickly and fire its own buy right behind it, competing through the same priority fee auction that decides ordering among transactions the sequencer receives in a given window. The advantage shifts from watching a queue to simply being faster and better prepared than everyone else reacting to the same public event.
A real example worth knowing about
In November 2025, Jesse Pollak, the creator of Base, launched a personal creator coin called JESSE. It is worth being clear that this was not an official Base network token and had no connection to Coinbase. According to analysis from Arkham Intelligence reported at the time, two snipers bought roughly 26 percent of the token's supply within the same block it launched, and together made more than 1.3 million dollars from the trade. The episode became a widely discussed example of just how much of the earliest activity on a new token can come from automated buyers rather than ordinary people clicking through an app.
Nothing about that outcome depended on the token being a scam. JESSE went on to trade actively after its launch. The point is narrower: being early is not the same as being organic, and a fast initial price move is frequently a sign that bots got there first, not a sign of broad genuine demand.
Why launch mechanics try to work around this
Some of the token launch designs covered elsewhere on this blog exist partly as a response to exactly this dynamic. A Dutch auction removes the reward for racing into the very first block, since the price falls on a schedule regardless of who buys first. Certain fair launch structures try to blunt it with allowlists or launch throttles. None of these fully eliminate bot activity, but they are a direct acknowledgment that an unprotected, instantly tradeable pool tends to get picked apart by automation before a typical buyer even has the page loaded.
What this means for you
A few practical takeaways, none of which require you to compete with a bot's infrastructure, because you are not going to win that race and do not need to.
A quick pump right after launch is not information about a token's quality. It mostly tells you bots were watching. Treat the first few minutes of trading as noise rather than a signal either way.
Speed is not a strategy available to an ordinary buyer. Bots that snipe launches typically run dedicated infrastructure built for exactly this purpose. Trying to manually beat them to a brand new pool is not a fair fight, and losing that race is not a sign you did anything wrong.
The checks that matter do not depend on timing. Whether a contract is verified, whether liquidity is locked, who holds the supply, these are covered in our guide to researching a token before you swap it, and they are just as valid to check five minutes after launch as five seconds after.
Buying later is not automatically worse. Letting the earliest bot driven volatility settle before deciding whether a token is worth your attention is a reasonable choice, not a missed opportunity. The entry price a sniper bot got in the first block is not a price an ordinary buyer was ever realistically going to get.
The short version
Sniper bots buy new tokens the instant a pool goes live, and on Base they do this by reacting within milliseconds to a public event rather than by watching a mempool that does not exist here. The 2025 JESSE launch is a concrete example of how much value can move in a single block before most people are even aware a token exists. None of this requires you to trade faster. It just means the earliest price action on a brand new token usually belongs to bots, not to the market finding its footing, and it is worth remembering that the next time a chart looks like it started without you.
Sources: How Snipers Scooped Over $1M From Base Creator Jesse's Token, DL News, Bots Earn $1.3 Million From Base Creator's Token Launch, Forklog