Original | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )
Author: Wenser ( @wenser 2010 )
With the conclusion of the US court ruling that the US Treasury Departments sanctions on Tornado Cash smart contracts are illegal, its token TORN once rose more than 10 times to $43, and the privacy track has once again attracted high attention. (For details, please read the article Court ruling that OFAC sanctions on Tornado Cash are illegal, TORN soared more than 10 times )
Taking advantage of this momentum, anoncast, the anonymous speech application under the Base ecosystem Farcaster protocol that had previously caused market FOMO, has also returned to the spotlight.
Initially, the project token ANON was bought by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik and Base protocol leader Jesse Pollak. Later, Vitalik highly praised it for having a great opportunity to showcase the best of free speech while avoiding the quagmire of spam and low-quality content. Yesterday, the app and the official X platform account had another farce of ANONFUN vs anonfun token capitalization dispute.
Can anoncast become a new star in the privacy track in the future? Can the market value of ANON token reach a new high of 100 million US dollars? Can anoncast and Clanker create new sparks? Where will anoncast go in the future?
Odaily Planet Daily will discuss the above issues one by one in this article for readers reference . (Note: The following content does not constitute investment advice, please choose investment targets with caution)
ANON’s counterpart token: TORN, the leader in the privacy track
On November 27, court documents from the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court showed that a U.S. court ruled that sanctions on Tornado Cash smart contracts were illegal.
When the news came out, the industry was in an uproar.
After all, Tornado Cash was previously hit by a lot of controversy over sanctions imposed by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Tornado Cash founder and core developer Alexey Pertsev and Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm were also sanctioned or criminally prosecuted by government authorities in the Netherlands and the United States in May and September of this year, respectively. The project’s token TORN also fell from a high of around $436 to around $2. Now, the privacy track has seen a turnaround.
Later, the news was confirmed by Paul Grewal, Chief Legal Officer of Coinbase, who wrote :
Privacy wins. Today, the U.S. Fifth Circuit ruled that the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions against the Tornado Cash smart contract were unlawful. This is a historic victory for cryptocurrency and all those who care about defending freedom.
Now these smart contracts must be removed from the sanctions list, and Americans will once again be allowed to use this privacy-preserving protocol. In other words, the government’s overreach can no longer continue. No one wants criminals using crypto protocols, but Congress did not authorize a complete blockade of open source technology because a small percentage of users are bad actors. These sanctions expand the Treasury Department’s authority beyond recognition, and the Fifth Circuit agreed.
Specifically, the court ruled that while the Treasury Department has the authority to take action against ‘property,’ the open-source, immutable smart contracts at the heart of Tornado Cash cannot be owned by just anyone and therefore are not ‘property’ subject to sanctions.
Simply put, the Tornado Cash incident helped the cryptocurrency industry achieve a temporary victory on the grounds of technology innocence.
No wonder Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase and a well-known cryptocurrency entrepreneur, cheered: Privacy wins. Smart contracts win. Tornado Cash wins. And OFAC loses.
As a member of the Ethereum ecosystem, Base ecosystems privacy application anoncast will naturally have its own place.
First of all, from the perspective of ecological position, anoncast is one of the three great sovereign personal toolkits. Previously, Vitalik discussed anoncast together with the popular product Polymarket, the crypto prediction market, this year, saying that both of them practiced the goal of cryptocurrency is to achieve concrete changes in the world and make the world more free, open and collaborative ; anoncast officials also previously issued a statement saying that they are listed as sovereign personal tool components together with Polymarket and Railgun, the former ensuring the freedom of speech of individuals to speak anonymously; the latter two are public opinion prediction and privacy protocol (for details, see the article Revealing Railgun: A privacy service that has handled $2 billion and a zk tool to cover up money laundering on the chain) .
Secondly, from the perspective of token market value, ANONs market potential is still in the early discovery stage. According to Coingecko data, TORNs market value was close to $150 million at one time, based on its total supply of 10 million and actual circulation of less than 4 million. The price of a single token was as high as $436. In contrast, according to GMGN data , ANONs total supply is 1 billion, and its current market value is only $28 million, with a single token price of only $0.028. According to the corresponding token supply: market value ratio, ANONs market value potential is about 5-8 times; the price growth space for a single token is about 10-15 times. Of course, there is still a certain gap between the scope of application of the two protocols and their market influence.
Finally, from the perspective of future growth, the market flexibility of anoncast applications is better. As an on-chain social application derived from the Farcaster protocol client Supercast and superanon, anoncast has undergone a series of changes based on the Farcaster ecological style: for example, its official X platform account has become a decentralized anonymous speech platform; the combination with the Base ecological one-click coin issuance application AI Agent Clanker has also opened up imagination space for anonymous one-click coin issuance; in the future, based on the Ethereum ecology, Base ecology, and Farcaster ecology, anoncast will continue to grow and develop gradually, and is expected to create a path of decentralized anonymous speech protocol based on open source development.
The above three reasons have laid a solid foundation for the development of anoncast and ANON tokens. In addition, Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero has supported anoncast many times before. In addition to buying tokens, Vitalik has also discussed with @Slokh, the developer behind anoncast, about relevant technical details such as whether a serverless version of the application can be built .
anoncast is an open source protocol
Of course, after attracting so much attention, anoncast, which uses anonymous speech + anonymous coin issuance as its main gimmick, is also full of dramatic plots. Among them, the token capitalization dispute that occurred yesterday is particularly worth mentioning.
The controversy over the capitalization of tokens has resurfaced: anonfun VS ANONFUN?
On November 27, when Clanker was developing rapidly, the official X platform account of anoncast, a rising star of social applications on the Base chain, announced that it had launched an anonymous token issuance function anonfun .
According to the introduction, To release an anonymous token (anonfun coin), please mention @clanker on anoncast and tell it what you want to release, such as the token symbol, name and picture. If it is promoted, it will be posted to @anonfun and released through Clanker.
Tweet picture
Subsequently, an anonymous member of the community created the anonfun token through Clanker. Stimulated by the same ticker as the application, anonfun experienced twists and turns and successfully exceeded 1 million US dollars in market value at 2 pm on November 28. However, things soon took a sharp turn for the worse.
According to Farcaster community member @sylphy , the creator of the anonfun token was not anoncast official, but an account named anonfuntoken (FID: 886516). Later, the account deleted the coin issuance tweet, which directly led to the loss of anonfuns birth certificate.
On the other hand, ANONFUN, which is suspected to be the official platform of anoncast, is about to make its debut (Note from Odaily Planet Daily: Due to the anonymous speech mechanism of anoncast, we cannot be sure whether the creator of ANONFUN is an official staff of anoncast).
Around 4 pm on November 28, the community discovered that the official X platform account of anoncast and the Farcaster account simultaneously released ANONFUN tokens and contract addresses. The project suffered from FOMO because community members speculated that it might be released by anoncast officials. The market value once surged to around 2.7 million US dollars within a few hours.
Anonymous tweets from the anoncast official account have now been deleted
But at the same time, ANONFUN is not necessarily official orthodoxy.
Later, an anonymous community member posted a reminder : Let me clarify the facts: a noncast cooperated with clanker, so on Thanksgiving Day, clanker could only create tokens by the @anonfun account (Odaily Planet Daily Note: Clanker had previously announced that it was temporarily closed and would be reopened after subsequent updates); 2. An anonymous community member, not the developer, launched the ANONFUN token; 3. The market value of the token exceeded $1 million within 15 minutes.
anonfun and ANONFUN
According to GMGN data , the current price of anonfun has fallen to around US$0.000001, and its market value has been falling all the way. It has fallen by about 90% from its high point and is currently around US$100,000; the current price of ANONFUN has fallen to around US$0.000005, and its market value has fallen by 20% from its high point and is currently around US$538,000.
After anonymous coin issuance became a kind of decentralized power, the market became a shadow of emotions, and in this token capitalization dispute, there is currently no winner.
The future direction of anoncast: community notes, reporting mailbox or anonymous coin issuance platform?
According to the anoncast official website , the posting requirements are as follows:
Hold 5,000 ANON (currently about $135): Post to the anonymous information flow account @rawanon ;
Hold 2,000,000 ANON (currently about $54,000): Promote the post to @anoncast and X/Twitter platforms;
Hold 2,000,000 ANON (currently about $54,000): can delete the post.
anoncast official website interface
At the same time, anonfun, an anonymous one-click coin issuance application built based on anoncast and Clanker, has also created its own token ecosystem.
According to Dune data , the total market value of anonfun x Claner v3 related token projects is currently about 3.682 million US dollars; the 24-hour trading volume is about 6.779 million US dollars, among which ACLANK ( 0x2b80c582d1e7c6b2c7742c0ed089ac7327f31527 ) temporarily ranks first with a market value of 1.8 million US dollars; ANONFUN ( 0x370ec5bcde87c50e89a797db6107eb2e2ffe9f58 ) ranks second with a market value of 760,000 US dollars; 🐸 ( 0x3fdfef8508deffffefba88c6a15788d2a4feb874 ) became popular for the frog symbol commonly seen in Meme coins. Its current market value is about 110,000 US dollars, temporarily ranking third.
In general, there are three future directions for anoncast:
First, Vitalik has mentioned Community Notes many times before (he first mentioned it twice in July: once he called it a flagship social cognition technology ; once he said that prediction markets and Community Notes are actually very complementary ), which is to rely on the power of decentralized communities to mark certain events or content, similar to the community reader feedback under some tweets on the X platform. The anonymity of anoncast can provide a convenient speaking environment for this type of application direction with the help of ZK technology;
The second is to act as a reporting mailbox similar to the Prism Gate Incident. Anoncast may also make some achievements in this regard. However, this type of application is currently limited by the narrow user group of Farcaster ecosystem, and its impact range and user group are relatively limited;
The third is to become an anonymous coin issuance platform, that is, to provide a convenient production environment for anonymous coin issuers, which can even be called a hotbed to a certain extent. After all, Clanker has further lowered the threshold for coin issuance with the help of AI Agent; not only that, anoncast has also supported optional identity authentication , which also facilitates token creators to conduct subsequent identity authentication and benefit return acquisition.
Another idea is that if anoncast can continue to exert the Meme effect and gain wider dissemination and attention, then the account may become a major cyber attention highland - an anonymous billboard that operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, just like many crypto projects have tried before. Of course, this may also further contribute to the occurrence of crypto fraud incidents.
After all, even Musk bluntly said in 2021: Twitter is essentially a billboard mixed with crypto scams.
Conclusion: ANON is not just a Meme coin, but also a high wall to protect privacy rights
In the future, whether Anoncast and ANON can take on the responsibility of becoming the rising stars in the privacy track will mainly depend on whether they can stand out in the following two aspects:
First, whether it can continue to receive attention and application from crypto industry leaders such as Vitalik;
Second, whether it can play its role in social events with a certain influence.
If the value of the second point can be further developed, anoncast will not only be an on-chain anonymous social application, but also an anonymous protocol of the same magnitude as Tornado Cash. The only difference is that the latter mainly meets the anonymity of funds while the former mainly meets the anonymity of free speech needs.
In this way, ANON will not only be an ordinary privacy track meme coin, but will also build a cyber wall to protect freedom of speech and privacy rights.
