Original author: Joe, Foresight News
What is clanker? A social meme distribution platform, an AI Agent, and a meme.
In November, the Base ecosystem ushered in a new round of explosion, which has lasted for at least three weeks, and clanker is one of the most critical links. As of November 26, 2024, the market value of CLANKER, the first meme issued by clanker, has reached 70 million US dollars.
From November 8, 2024 to the present, at least three meme coins with a market value of over 10 million US dollars have been born on clanker: LUM (33 million US dollars), ANON (46 million US dollars), and CLANKER (70 million US dollars), and they are still on an upward trend.
Among them, the related product behind ANON - anoncast, uses the ZK anonymous posting function. Ethereum founder Vitalik mentioned anoncast four times on Warpcast last week and discussed with engineers how to make this product better. Vitalik himself took the initiative to purchase ANON tokens on November 21 to experience anoncasts products. The market believes that this is the first time Vitalik has taken the initiative to purchase meme coins in recent years.
The birth of these memes is inseparable from the help of clanker. clanker is becoming a hot meme maker in the Base ecosystem.
So, will it continue to create new “explosive memes”? What does it mean for Farcaster, Base, and even Ethereum?
clanker, launched three explosive memes worth tens of millions of dollars
clanker is an AI agent developed by Farcasters full-stack engineer Jack Dishman and Farcaster ecosystem RD founder @proxystudio.eth. It is mainly used to automatically deploy tokens on the Base network.
As of November 26, 2024, in just two weeks, Clanker has issued a total of 3,500 tokens and generated $4.2 million in revenue.
Unlike pump.fun, clanker publishes memes on the Web3 social platform Farcaster.
Users only need to @clanker, and then describe the name, content or even picture of the token they want to issue, and clanker will automatically deploy the token. Among them, the token LUM deployed by clanker is a classic case.
The birth of LUM is a token issued by two AI agents, namely aethernet and clanker. A Farcaster user named naaate asked the Higher community AI agent aethernet to help him issue a token. Aethernet, as an AI, asked another AI, clanker, to issue the token. This marks a milestone event in the collaborative issuance of tokens between AIs.
Two AIs are talking to each other and successfully issued a token LUM
The birth of LUM and its market value reaching tens of millions of dollars in a few days have brought clanker into the vision of Base community members.
Another token issued by Clanker, ANON, brought Clanker out of the community and allowed more people to learn about the Clanker product.
Twitter user @0x Luo said: ANON tokens are deployed by anonymous users through clankers in the anonymous posting account Superanon in the Farcaster third-party client Supercast. Later, many users airdropped $ANON to Supercast founder Woj, and Woj airdropped the $ANON he received to Supercast users, which received a wave of praise and increased community recognition.
Later, builders began to build an application ecosystem around the ANON token. The most popular one is the anonymous posting project anoncast.org that uses zk technology. It requires a certain amount of ANON to post.
Image credit: @0x Luo
The anonymous posting function of anoncast using zk technology attracted the attention of Vitailik. Vitailik posted four anoncast-related content on Warpcast in a week and purchased ANON tokens, which further broke the circle of ANON. The market value of ANON is also stable at 40 million US dollars.
The success of LUM and ANON has made people realize the value of clanker as two explosive meme makers. As of today, the market value of CLANKER tokens has surpassed LUM and ANON, reaching 70 million US dollars.
With all three elements, will clanker surpass pump.fun?
Combining the three elements of AI Agent, meme platform, and Web3 social networking, will clanker surpass pump.fun?
In this cycle, the Meme track has been monopolized by Solana, and this is inseparable from the success of pump.fun.
pump.fun (Data source: Dune)
Since March 2024, pump.fun has created 3.79 million memes for Solana and earned 1.45 million SOLs, or about $360 million in revenue. As a result, pump.fun has become the fastest Web3 application in the history of the entire crypto industry to earn $100 million in revenue. The success of pump.fun has directly brought a huge amount of funds and users into Solana, greatly promoting the development of Solana.
On the other hand, the major L2s of the Ethereum system, except for the emergence of Degen and other golden dogs on Base, have not had any major memes. However, the Ethereum system has not given up the meme track. The Ethereum community has placed hopes on Base to compete directly with Solana.
Clanker is perhaps the pump.fun of the Base ecosystem. However, clanker is different from pump.fun.
First of all, clanker is a product created by engineers from Farcaster, a Web3 social protocol. It is an AI agent built on Farcaster for automatically issuing tokens. clanker naturally has Web3 social attributes. Users create tokens on Farcaster.
Secondly, as a meme platform, Clanker’s transaction fees and revenue sharing model are different from the traditional pump.fun.
clankers transaction fee model is relatively transparent and fair. Clanker does not charge a creation fee when issuing tokens, but it will extract fees from transactions. Specifically, clanker creates and locks a full range of Uniswap v3 liquidity pools (LPs) with a transaction fee of 1%, of which 40% of the fees are allocated to requesters (i.e. those who issue tokens through clanker), and 60% belongs to clanker. On pump.fun, users can create tokens at a very low fee, usually 0.02 SOL, but the transaction fee is 1%, which all belongs to the pump.fun platform operator and is used to maintain the operation of the platform and provide liquidity.
Finally, Clanker pays more attention to the integration with AI technology, and actively tries and combines AI Agent with products in various ways. This is also related to the strong engineering technology atmosphere of the entire Coinbase Group, Base Ecosystem, and Farcaster Ecosystem.
Base, creating a new trend of app-based memes
Different from Solana’s “pure gambling meme”, Base is creating a new trend of “application-based meme”. The emergence of clankers means that Base has opened up this new ecological closed loop.
From Degen to Higher, LUNA, Aethernet, LUM, CLANKER, Bases application-based memes are increasing in number, with increasingly distinct features, and have gradually become a trend, style, and culture.
Bases applied memes are divided into two types: one is memes that make applications, and the other is applications that make memes. Representatives of the first type are: Degen, Higher (Aethernet); representatives of the second type are: Farcaster, Virtuals (LUNA), clanker (LUM).
The core members of Base and Farcaster also encourage developers in the ecosystem to release memes while developing applications, and even engineers to release the finished products in the form of memes immediately while they are developing them.
Under the competitive pressure of Solana meme attracting a lot of funds and traffic, the application-based meme created and initially systematized by Base will be a good way for the Ethereum system to break through the siege. After all, no matter how good the technology and ideas are, they cannot be developed sustainably without a lot of funds and user support.
Both Polymarket and Farcaster have the characteristic of combining the development of truly meaningful applications with the element of gambling, which not only attracts true believers but also attracts gamblers and traders who account for a large proportion of the crypto industry.
