How CL207 Sniped their own shares on friend.tech

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Contents

1. Introduction

2. Some context

3. How it was done

4. TL;DR

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1. Introduction

If you've been following friend.tech, you've probably seen this image posted by CL207 on Twitter.

As an acclaimed crypto Twitter personality and Egirl capital... something? In all honesty, I don't know what rank he holds over there. Anyways, his sign-up was highly anticipated by snipers and regular traders alike. Nonetheless, trading for CL's shares started at a whopping .3eth with 70 supply... with him as the sole owner! How did he achieve this?

2. Some context

Some brief context on base to understand what happened. Base - Coinbase's newly launched Ethereum L2 - is built on the Optimism stack. This is important for two reasons:

1. The mempool is private - you cannot see pending transactions.

2. New blocks are pushed every 2 seconds.

3. How it was done

With the aforementioned in mind, it should be very clear what happened! In his tweet, CL mentions "cat mev team #1". Sadly (or thankfully!), there isn't any crazy MEV going on here, if at all. Since the mempool is private, all you need to do is send your initial purchase transaction and immediately queue a second transaction purchasing however many shares you want such that they get included in the same block. Since the mempool isn't public, there's no feasible way for someone to sneak in between these transactions.

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TL;DR

Send your initial purchase transaction and immediately queue a second transaction such that they are both included within the same block (ideally, both transactions will use the same gas price). You have less than 2 seconds to send both transactions as a new block is pushed every 2s on Base.

As you can see in this image (c/o @atarashi on Twitter), CL purchased all his shares in block 3232854.

And that's it! I hope you enjoyed the read :)