MarsBit Note: On November 21, the Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin's address vitalik.eth spent 0.082 ETH to buy 30303 ANON. An hour later, the Base protocol lead Jesse Pollak's address also exchanged 0.333 ETH for 31529 ANON. As a result, the ANON price surged in the short term, and as of the time of writing, the market value was temporarily reported at $60 million.
In this Meme bull market, due to being constantly overshadowed by the Solana ecosystem, even though large MC memecoins are frequently appearing, the Meme projects in the Base ecosystem still seem to be "quietly rising".
And in the past two days, a coin called $ANON in the Base ecosystem, which has been online for only six days, has been rising all the way, reaching a peak market value of $22 million.
Although it cannot match the "one-day breakthrough" of the current Solana Meme projects, the $ANON in the Base ecosystem has such a surge in the context of the market's attention being more focused on the BTC and Solana frenzy, which is worth exploring.
Is $ANON a new value narrative or a new layout of the conspiracy group in Base? TechFlow analyzes the origin and development of $ANON through event sorting.
Supercast and Superanon
The story begins with the Polish developer woj (@wojtekwtf) creating the social product Supercast based on the Farcaster protocol in October 2024. Supercast is a peer-level application layer like the top social product Warpcast in the Base ecosystem. Supercast introduced an anonymous posting function called Superanon, which supports users to post anonymously through Superanon accounts using zk proof technology, but requires a membership fee of 10U/month.
Obviously, the Superanon application that allows anonymous posting is very popular with crypto users (or Farcaster ecosystem users). Within three weeks of its launch, Superanon already has more than 4,300 followers, and many of the most heated discussions about Farcaster are posted anonymously by users on the Superanon account. The developer woj himself is also very proud, saying "this is the most successful launch I've had recently".
Anonymous users + AI minting, is $ANON really a community coin?
Superanon has been running smoothly since its launch, and on November 14, an anonymous user interacted with the Farcaster ecosystem's AI Agent account @clanker through the Superanon account and successfully issued a $ANON MEME coin, then airdropped 1% of the tokens to Supercast founder woj, who was unaware at the time.
(It is worth mentioning that the recently popular AI Meme $LUM in the Base ecosystem was also released by the AI Agent @clanker, with a current market value of $30 million.)
Until woj woke up and found $25,000 worth of $ANON in his wallet, he directly chose to airdrop all the $ANON in his wallet to the more than 1,000 member users who paid to use Supercast. (woj's original words: "It's cool, but I can't fully support it, because any Supercast token will be distributed to its users.")
woj's very crypto-spirited move was greatly appreciated by the community, and with $ANON's own "zk+anonymous+AI minting" version Buff, the community naturally went crazy for the sufficiently decentralized narrative of $ANON, and within a day of its launch, the $ANON reached a peak market value of $4.5 million.
At the same time, the community also supported woj's crypto spirit with practical actions: $ANON holders in the Farcaster community voluntarily sent more than $40,000 worth of 13 million tokens to the developer to be redistributed to Supercast users.
The uppercase vs. lowercase dispute is back?
However, before the uppercase $ANON had even boiled for long, the next day woj posted on Warpcast that he wanted to change the "?" icon of superanon to a cute little dog image, mint it as an NFT on the Zora platform and airdrop it to Supercast members, and this NFT can be converted into the lowercase $anon in the form of a picture-to-coin. But he also emphasized that "it currently only has collectible value and is purely coincidental with the uppercase $ANON".
In other words, the woj who just used self-certification to hype up the uppercase $ANON the day before, the next day launched a lowercase $anon by himself...
However, this round of "uppercase vs. lowercase dispute" is not as intense as $Neiro and $eliza, or rather, the lowercase $anon is not at all a match for the uppercase $ANON. As of the time of writing, the market value of the uppercase $ANON is close to $20 million, while the market value of the lowercase $anon is still hovering around $300,000, but woj himself is super fond of the image of this little dog.
"ANON" applications are further differentiating
With both narrative and consensus, but woj doesn't seem particularly interested in further use cases for $ANON. However, the community has already come up with new ideas for $ANON.
Twitter user @0xLuo has made a classification map of the current "ANON" ecosystem, clearly showing the clear context of the current "ANON" projects.
Developers have created new applications based on $ANON, including anoncast, a zk-proof anonymous publishing application similar to superanon but exclusive for $ANON Holders, and the art project Base Colors.
anoncast
anoncast inherits the anonymous posting function of superanon, but the difference is that users need to hold a certain amount of uppercase $ANON in their wallets in order to use the application, and different holding amounts unlock different functions.
The most basic posting function requires holding 30,000 $ANON tokens (currently about $450). And more advanced functions, such as promoting posts to X/Twitter platforms or deleting published posts, require holding 1 million $ANON tokens (currently about $16,000).
Crypto bigwigs are also very interested in anoncast, with Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero (@dwr) tweeting and retweeting content about anoncast multiple times, and V God also discussing technical details with anoncast developer @Slokh on Warpcast.
Base Colors
Base Colors is a collection of Internet colors as Non-Fungible Tokens. Each color is unique, and the owner can name it on the blockchain, with no two people able to own the same color and no two colors able to have the same name.
Developer @0FJAKE said that the unique colors can establish the uniqueness of anonymous identities, i.e. confirming the attribute of "you are you".
Summary
From $Degen to $ANON, the "product coins" that have been burning hot on the Farcaster ecosystem do seem to be taking a fairly solid and reliable path - the tokens are always running around the community and users.
It's just that in the course of progress, it's inevitable that non-community members will enter for pure speculation purposes, which is not necessarily a bad thing for the token itself, as the continuous price increase will also allow more "outsiders" to further understand the project itself, thereby retaining more users interested in the community.
The real value of tokens like $Degen and $ANON is not in the short-term market value fluctuations, but in whether they can build a self-organizing, self-evolving ecosystem. Such an ecosystem can continuously adapt to user needs and evolve with the push of the community, ultimately transforming from the simple frenzy of Meme speculation to a practical utility token.
