What is a clanker? A social meme issuance platform, an AI Agent, or a meme.
In November, the Base ecosystem is experiencing a new round of explosion, which has been going on for at least three weeks, and clanker is one of the most critical links. As of November 26, 2024, the market value of the first meme CLANKER issued by clanker has reached $70 million.
From November 8, 2024 to the present, at least three meme coins with a market value of over $10 million have been born on clanker: LUM ($33 million), ANON ($46 million), and CLANKER ($70 million), and they are still in 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 in a week and discussed with engineers how to improve this product. Vitalik himself actively purchased the ANON token on November 21 to experience the anoncast product, and the market believes this is the first time Vitalik has actively purchased a meme coin in recent years.
And the birth of these memes is inseparable from the help of clanker. Clanker is becoming the "hit meme" manufacturer on the Base ecosystem.
Will it continue to create new "hit memes"? What is its significance for Farcaster, Base, and even Ethereum?
Clanker has launched three "hit memes" worth tens of millions of dollars
Clanker is an AI agent, developed by Farcaster's full-stack engineer Jack Dishman and the founder of the Farcaster ecosystem @proxystudio.eth, mainly used to automate the deployment of tokens on the Base network.
As of November 26, 2024, in just two weeks, clanker has issued 3,500 tokens and generated $4.2 million in revenue.
Unlike pump.fun, clanker issues memes on the Web3 social platform Farcaster.
Users only need to @clanker, and then describe in words the name, content, or even pictures 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 was a token co-issued by two AI agents, aethernet and clanker. A Farcaster user named naaate asked the AI agent aethernet of the Higher community to help him issue a token, and aethernet, as an AI, had another AI - clanker issue the token. This marks a milestone event in the collaboration between AI and AI to issue tokens.
Two AIs are in dialogue, successfully issuing a token LUM
The birth of LUM and its reaching a market value of tens of millions of dollars in just a few days has also brought clanker into the vision of Base community members.
And the other token issued by clanker, ANON, has taken clanker out of the community and let more people know about the clanker product.
Twitter user @0xLuo said: "The ANON token was deployed by clanker for the anonymous posting account Superanon in the Farcaster third-party client Supercast. Later, many users airdropped $ANON to Supercast founder woj, and woj then airdropped the acquired $ANON to Supercast users, gaining good reviews and also enhancing community recognition."
"Afterwards, builders also started to build an application ecosystem around the ANON token, the most out-of-circle one being the anonymous posting project anoncast.org, which requires holding a certain amount of ANON to post."
Image source: @0xLuo
And the anonymous posting function of anoncast using zk technology has attracted Vitalik's attention. Vitalik posted four related content about anoncast on Warpcast in a week and also purchased the ANON token, further breaking the circle of ANON. The market value of ANON has also stabilized at around $40 million.
The success of LUM and ANON has made people aware of the value of clanker as a platform for "hit meme manufacturing". As of today, the market value of the CLANKER token has surpassed LUM and ANON, reaching $70 million.
With the three major elements gathered, can clanker surpass pump.fun?
Combining the three major elements of AI Agent, meme platform, and Web3 social, can clanker surpass pump.fun?
The Meme track in this cycle has been "monopolized" by Solana, which is inseparable from the success of pump.fun.
pump.fun (data source: Dune)
From March 2024 to the present, pump.fun has created 3.79 million memes for Solana and obtained 1.45 million SOL, about $360 million in revenue. pump.fun has thus become the Web3 application that has the fastest reached $100 million in revenue in the history of the crypto industry. The success of pump.fun has directly channeled massive funds and user traffic into Solana, greatly promoting the development of Solana.
In contrast, apart from Degen appearing on Base, there have been no other major out-of-circle memes on Ethereum's various L2s. However, the Ethereum ecosystem has not given up on the meme track. Base is being entrusted by the Ethereum community with the hope of competing directly with Solana.
And clanker may be the pump.fun in the Base ecosystem. But clanker is different from pump.fun.
First, clanker is a product created by the engineers of the Web3 social protocol Farcaster, and is a kind of AI Agent built on Farcaster for automatically deploying tokens. Clanker naturally has the attribute of Web3 social. The user's behavior of creating tokens is also carried out on Farcaster.
Secondly, as a meme platform, clanker's transaction fee and revenue sharing model is different from the traditional pump.fun.
Clanker's transaction fee model is relatively transparent and fair. Clanker does not charge a creation fee when issuing tokens, but will extract fees from the transactions. Specifically, clanker creates and locks a full-range Uniswap v3 liquidity pool (LP), with a transaction fee of 1%, of which 40% of the fee is allocated to the requestor (i.e., those who issue tokens through clanker), and 60% belongs to clanker. While on pump.fun, users can create tokens at a very low fee, usually 0.02 SOL, but the transaction fee is 1%, and this fee is entirely owned by the pump.fun platform operator for maintaining platform operations and providing liquidity.
Finally, clanker is more focused on the integration with AI technology, actively trying to combine AI agents with products in various ways. This is also related to the strong engineering and technical atmosphere of the entire Coinbase group, the Base ecosystem, and the Farcaster ecosystem.
Base, creating a new trend of "application-based memes"
Unlike Solana's "purely speculative memes", Base is creating a new trend of "application-based memes". The emergence of clanker represents that Base has connected this entirely new ecosystem loop.
From Degen, to Higher, LUNA, Aethernet, LUM, CLANKER, the "application-based memes" in the Base ecosystem are increasing, with more and more distinct features, gradually becoming a trend, style and culture.
The "application-based memes" in Base are divided into two types: one is memes as applications, and the other is applications as memes. The representatives of the first type are: Degen, Higher (Aethernet); the 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 issue memes while building applications, and even the engineers themselves issue memes in the form of products they have developed.
Under the competitive pressure of Solana memes attracting a large amount of capital and traffic, the "application-based memes" created and initially systematized by Base may be a good way for the Ethereum ecosystem to break through the siege, after all, even if the technology and ideas are good, without the support of a large amount of capital and users, it is impossible to develop sustainably.
Whether it is Polymarket or Farcaster, they have the characteristic of combining the development of truly meaningful applications and gambling elements, attracting both true believers and users, as well as gamblers and traders who account for a not low proportion in the crypto industry.
