How did ANON attract Vitalik, Base founder Jesse, and Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero? And how did it drive clanker and 33bits?
Author: KarenZ, Foresight News
On November 21st at 09:16 Beijing time, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin used 0.082 ETH (about $249.63) to exchange for 30,303.464 ANON on the Base network. As a result, ANON surged over 210% in 1 hour, and its market cap has now risen to $46 million. Subsequently, Base founder Jesse Pollak's address also exchanged 0.333 ETH (about $993.41) for 31,529 ANON.
ANON 4-hour K-line chart, source: DEX Screener
As is well known, Vitalik has always had a fondness for privacy. So what is ANON? Why did it gain the favor of Vitalik, Jesse Pollak, and Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero?
Where does ANON come from?
When it comes to the ANON token, we have to mention Supercast first. Supercast is a Farcaster client that provides an anonymous posting feature called Superanon. Individual subscriptions to Supercast cost $10 per month, while team subscriptions are $30 per month. When Supercast developer woj was sleeping, community members posted through the Superanon feature and tagged the autonomous AI clanker, subsequently creating the ANON token. When woj woke up, he said it was a cool thing. However, he also clearly stated that he could not fully support this move, as any tokens of Supercast would be distributed to its users. For this reason, many ANON token holders in the Farcaster community voluntarily donated 13 million ANON tokens worth over $40,000 at the time (now worth $600,000) to woj, with the aim of allowing these tokens to be redistributed to Supercast users. As a result, ANON became an anonymous token that allows anonymous posting using ZK proofs.
Currently, posting anonymous posts on Farcaster requires at least 15,000 ANON (lowered this morning, previously 30,000). More advanced features, such as promoting posts to X (formerly Twitter) or deleting posts, require at least 1 million ANON. Initially, due to computational complexity, posting and executing other operations could take several minutes, but now posting on @anoncast takes about 20 seconds, although the content will not appear on the account until 1-2 minutes later.
ANON's explosion drives clanker and 33bits
In my previous article "Unprecedented Prosperity, Reviewing the Potential of AI Meme Coins", I mentioned that the "GOAT" LUM on Base is a token created by the Aethernet AI agent on Warpcast through conversations with the clanker (clanker.world) AI agent. At that time, the market cap of LUM was $7.8 million, and the market cap of the clanker token was less than $1.2 million. Ten days later today, the market cap of LUM has risen to $21 million (it once reached $80 million on November 15), and the market cap of clanker has reached $8.9 million. On clanker, you only need to @clanker on Farcaster and include the name of the token you want to create, and clanker will automatically reply with the created token and the clanker.world link. Currently, there are 1,953 tokens created through clanker.
Source: Dune
It is worth mentioning that the explosion of ANON has also driven another ZK application called 33bits that was released a year ago. 33bits has also been followed by Dan Romero, allowing Farcaster users with FID (Farcaster ID) ≤ 20001 to post anonymously on Warpcast.
When a user logs in to Warpcast, 33bits will link their FID to a new signer. When posting, the user must prove through ZK that their FID ≤ 20001, and this proof is generated using the user's new signer. The entire process (including authentication and proof generation) is done in the user's browser, maintaining the privacy of their FID. After creating the proof, it will be verified on the application's backend. If the proof is valid, the user's post will be sent to the @33bits account via the API and published anonymously. After issuing tokens through clanker yesterday, 33bits currently has a market cap of $2.7 million.
The name "33bits" refers to the concept of "33 Bits of Entropy" proposed by Princeton University professor Arvind Narayanan, which claims that only 33 bits of information are needed to de-anonymize an individual, as there are only 6.6 billion people in the world.
As Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero said, the deployment of assets by AI agents on-chain and ZK-driven anonymous group accounts are two major trends on Farcaster recently.
References:
https://x.com/toady_hawk/status/1857100545850298534
https://github.com/33bits-xyz
https://anoncast.org/
