The Base ecosystem is stirring up a wave of privacy applications. Can ANON's market value break through 100 million dollars?
Author: Wenser, Odaily Planet Daily
With the conclusion of the "U.S. Court Rules U.S. Treasury's Sanctions on Tornado Cash Smart Contracts as Illegal" case, its token TORN surged over 10 times to $43, bringing renewed attention to the privacy sector.
Riding this wave, the anonymous messaging application anoncast, under the Base ecosystem's Farcaster protocol, has also returned to the spotlight after previously triggering market FOMO.
Initially, the project's token ANON was purchased by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik and Base protocol leader Jesse Pollak. Subsequently, Vitalik highly praised it, stating it "has a great opportunity to showcase the best of free speech while avoiding the quagmire of spam and low-quality content." Yesterday, the application and its official X platform account were involved in a farcical "ANONFUN vs anonfun token case sensitivity dispute."
Will anoncast become the "new star of the privacy sector"? Can the market cap of the ANON token reach a new high of $100 million? Will anoncast and Clanker spark new synergies? What direction might anoncast take in the future?
Odaily Planet Daily will explore these questions one by one in this article for readers' reference. (Note: The following content does not constitute investment advice; please choose investment targets cautiously.)
ANON's Benchmark Token: The Leader of the Privacy Sector ------ TORN
On November 27, U.S. Fifth Circuit Court documents showed that the U.S. court ruled the sanctions against Tornado Cash smart contracts illegal.
The news caused a stir in the industry.
After all, the sanctions against Tornado Cash by the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) had stirred significant controversy, and Tornado Cash founder and core developer Alexey Pertsev, along with developer Roman Storm, faced government scrutiny or criminal proceedings in the Netherlands and the U.S. earlier this year. The project token TORN had plummeted from a high of around $436 to about $2, but now the privacy sector is seeing a turnaround.
This news was also confirmed by Coinbase's Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal, who stated:
Privacy wins. Today, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court ruled that the U.S. Treasury's sanctions against Tornado Cash smart contracts are illegal. This is a historic victory for cryptocurrency and for all who care about defending freedom.
These smart contracts must now be removed from the sanctions list, and Americans will once again be allowed to use this privacy-preserving protocol. In other words, government overreach will not continue. No one wants criminals to use crypto protocols, but Congress did not authorize a complete ban on open-source technology just because a small number of users are bad actors. These sanctions expanded the Treasury's power to an unrecognizable extent, and the Fifth Circuit agreed.
Specifically, the court ruled that while the Treasury has the authority to act against 'property,' the core open-source, immutable smart contracts of Tornado Cash cannot be owned by anyone and therefore do not constitute sanctioned 'property.'
In simple terms, the Tornado Cash incident, under the "technology is not guilty" argument, has helped the cryptocurrency industry achieve a significant victory.
It's no wonder that former Coinbase CTO and renowned cryptocurrency entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan exclaimed, "Privacy has won. Smart contracts have won. Tornado Cash has won. And OFAC has lost."
As a part of the Ethereum ecosystem, the privacy application anoncast naturally has its place.
First, from the perspective of ecological positioning, anoncast is one of the "three pillars of sovereign personal tools." Previously, Vitalik discussed anoncast alongside this year's popular product, the crypto prediction market Polymarket, stating that both embody the goal of "using cryptocurrency to bring about concrete changes in the world, making it more free, open, and collaborative." The anoncast official account had also stated that it is on par with Polymarket and Railgun as "sovereign personal tool components," with the former ensuring freedom of speech for individuals; the latter two serve as public opinion forecasting and privacy protocols, respectively.
Second, from the perspective of market cap, the market potential of ANON is still in the early discovery stage. According to Coingecko data, TORN's market cap once approached $150 million, based on a total supply of 10 million tokens, with an actual circulating supply of less than 4 million, and its price once soared to $436; in contrast, according to GMGN data, ANON has a total supply of 1 billion tokens, with a current market cap of only $28 million and a token price of just $0.028. Based on the corresponding token supply-to-market cap ratio, ANON's market cap potential is approximately 5-8 times; the price per token could grow by about 10-15 times. Of course, the application scope and market influence of the two protocols still have some gaps.
Finally, from the perspective of future growth, anoncast's market flexibility is superior. As an on-chain social application derived from the Farcaster protocol clients Supercast and superanon, anoncast has undergone a series of changes while inheriting the Farcaster ecological style: for instance, its official X platform account has become a "decentralized anonymous messaging platform"; its integration with the Base ecosystem's one-click token issuance application AI Agent Clanker has opened up imaginative possibilities for "anonymous one-click token issuance"; moving forward, based on the Ethereum ecosystem, Base ecosystem, and Farcaster ecosystem, anoncast will continue to grow and develop, potentially paving the way for a "decentralized anonymous speech protocol based on open-source development."
These three major reasons collectively lay a solid foundation for the development of anoncast and the ANON token. Additionally, Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero has previously supported anoncast multiple times, and Vitalik, besides purchasing the token, has also discussed with anoncast's developer @Slokh about "whether it is possible to create a serverless version of the application" and other related technical details.
anoncast is an open-source protocol
Of course, after attracting so much attention, anoncast, which primarily touts "anonymous speech + anonymous token issuance," is not without its share of dramatic plots, particularly the "token case sensitivity dispute" that occurred yesterday.
Token Case Sensitivity Dispute: anonfun VS ANONFUN?
On November 27, at a time when Clanker was thriving, the official X platform account of anoncast announced that it had launched an anonymous token issuance feature called anonfun.
It was introduced that "to issue an anonymous token (anonfun coin), please mention @clanker on anoncast and tell it what you want to publish, such as the token symbol, name, and image. If promoted, it will be published to @anonfun and released through Clanker."
Tweet image
Subsequently, an anonymous community member created the anonfun token through Clanker, and stimulated by the same ticker as the application, anonfun successfully broke the $1 million market cap at 2 PM on November 28, but soon, the situation began to take a sharp downturn.
According to investigations by Farcaster community member @sylphy, the creator of the anonfun token was not the official anoncast but an account named anonfuntoken (FID: 886516). Subsequently, this account deleted its token issuance tweet, directly leading to the loss of anonfun's "birth certificate."
On the other hand, the suspected official version ANONFUN was about to make its debut (Note: Due to anoncast's anonymous speech mechanism, we cannot confirm whether the creator of ANONFUN is an official anoncast personnel).
Around 4 PM on November 28, the community discovered that the official anoncast X platform account and Farcaster account simultaneously released the ANONFUN token and contract address. The project was speculated by community members to possibly be released by anoncast officials, resulting in FOMO, and its market cap surged to around $2.7 million within a few hours.
The previous anonymous tweet from the anoncast official account has now been deleted
However, ANONFUN is not necessarily the "official version."
Subsequently, an anonymous community member posted a reminder stating: "Let me clarify the facts: anoncast collaborates with Clanker, so on Thanksgiving Day, tokens can only be created by the @anonfun account* (Note: Clanker had previously announced a temporary closure, waiting for subsequent updates to reopen); *2. The ANONFUN token was launched by anonymous community members, not developers; 3. The token's market cap broke $1 million within 15 minutes."
anonfun vs ANONFUN
According to GMGN data, anonfun's price has now dropped to around $0.000001, with its market cap plummeting by about 90% from its peak, currently around $100,000; ANONFUN has also seen its price drop to around $0.000005, with its market cap down to about 20% from its peak, currently around $538,000.
As anonymous token issuance becomes a form of "decentralized power," the market has become a shadow of emotions, and in this token case sensitivity dispute, there appear to be no winners.
Future Direction of anoncast: Community Notes, Reporting Box, or Anonymous Token Issuance Platform?
According to information from the anoncast official website, the posting requirements are as follows:
Holding 5,000 ANON (currently about $135): Post to the anonymous information stream account @rawanon;
Holding 2,000,000 ANON (currently about $54,000): Promote the post to @anoncast and X/Twitter platforms;
Holding 2,000,000 ANON (currently about $54,000): Can delete posts.
anoncast official website interface
At the same time, the anonymous one-click token issuance application anonfun, built on anoncast and Clanker, has also created its own "token ecosystem."
According to Dune data statistics, the total market cap of anonfun x Clanker v3 related token projects is approximately $3.682 million; the 24-hour trading volume is about $6.779 million, among which ACLANK (0x2b80c582d1e7c6b2c7742c0ed089ac7327f31527) temporarily ranks first with a market cap of $1.8 million; ANONFUN (0x370ec5bcde87c50e89a797db6107eb2e2ffe9f58) ranks second with a market cap of $760,000; 🐸 (0x3fdfef8508deffffefba88c6a15788d2a4feb874) has gained popularity with the common meme coin frog symbol, currently with a market cap of about $110,000, ranking third.
Overall, anoncast's future direction has three possibilities:
First, it could be the Community Notes that Vitalik has mentioned multiple times (the earliest mention was on July 2, where he referred to it as a flagship social cognition technology; he also stated that prediction markets and Community Notes are actually very complementary), relying on the power of a decentralized community to annotate a particular event or content, similar to the "community reader feedback" seen under some tweets on the X platform; anoncast's anonymity can leverage ZK technology to provide a convenient speaking environment for this application direction;
Second, it could serve as a reporting box similar to the "Prism scandal," where anoncast also has potential achievements in this area. However, such applications are currently limited by the narrow user base of the Farcaster ecosystem, relatively restricting their impact and user group;
Third, it could become an anonymous token issuance platform, providing a convenient production environment for anonymous token issuers, and to some extent, it could be called a "breeding ground," as Clanker has further lowered the barriers to token issuance with AI Agent; moreover, anoncast has also supported optional identity verification, facilitating token creators' subsequent "identity verification" and "benefit return acquisition."
Another thought is that if anoncast can continue to leverage the meme effect and gain broader dissemination and attention, the account may become a significant "cyber attention stronghold"—a 7 x 24-hour operating "anonymous advertising billboard," just as many previous crypto projects have attempted, though this may also further fuel the emergence of "crypto scam incidents."
After all, even Musk once bluntly stated in 2021: "Twitter is essentially a billboard for crypto scams."
Conclusion: ANON is not just a Meme Coin, but a High Wall for Protecting Privacy Rights
Moving forward, whether anoncast and ANON can shoulder the responsibility of being the "new star of the privacy sector" largely depends on whether they can stand out in the following two aspects:
First, whether they can continue to attract the attention and application of leaders in the cryptocurrency industry like Vitalik;
Second, whether they can play a role in significant social events with a certain level of influence.
If the value of the second point can be further developed, anoncast will not just be an on-chain anonymous social application, but an "anonymous protocol" on par with Tornado Cash, with the distinction that the latter primarily meets the need for "funds anonymity," while the former primarily meets the need for "freedom of speech anonymity."
Thus, ANON will not merely be an unremarkable "privacy sector meme coin," but will also build a "cyber high wall protecting freedom of speech and privacy rights."