Author: Wenser, Odaily Planet Daily
With the conclusion of 'the U.S. court ruling that the U.S. Treasury's sanctions against Tornado Cash smart contracts are illegal,' its token TORN surged over 10 times to $43, and the privacy track has once again received significant attention.
Taking advantage of this tailwind, the anonymous speech application anoncast under the Base ecosystem's Farcaster protocol, which previously triggered market FOMO, is back in the spotlight.
Initially, the project's token ANON was bought in by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik and Base protocol head Jesse Pollak. Subsequently, Vitalik highly praised it as having 'a good opportunity to showcase the best free speech while avoiding the quagmire of spam and low-quality content.' Yesterday, the app and the official X platform account had a farce titled 'ANONFUN vs anonfun token case sensitivity dispute.'
Will anoncast be able to become the 'new star of the privacy track'? Can the market cap of the ANON token reach a new high of 100 million dollars? Can anoncast and Clanker spark new collaborations? Where might anoncast head in the future?
Odaily Planet Daily will explore the above issues one by one in this article for reader reference. (Note: The following content does not constitute investment advice; please choose investment targets carefully.)
The benchmark token for ANON: the leading privacy track—TORN
On November 27, U.S. Fifth Circuit Court documents revealed that the court ruled the sanctions against the Tornado Cash smart contracts were unlawful.
Upon the news breaking, the industry was in an uproar.
After all, the previous sanctions against Tornado Cash by the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) had caused quite a stir. Tornado Cash founder and core developer Alexey Pertsev and Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm faced government scrutiny or criminal prosecution in the Netherlands and the U.S. in May and September of this year, respectively. The project token TORN plummeted from a high of around $436 to near $2, but now, the privacy track sees a turn of events.
This news was later confirmed by Coinbase's Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal, who stated—
Privacy rights win. Today, the Fifth Circuit Court of the United States ruled that the U.S. Treasury's sanctions against the Tornado Cash smart contracts are illegal. This is a historic victory for cryptocurrency and all 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 protection protocol. In other words, the government's overreach will no longer continue. No one wants criminals to use crypto protocols, but Congress has not authorized a complete blockade of open-source technology simply because a small number of users are bad actors. These sanctions have expanded the Treasury's powers to an unrecognizable extent, and the Fifth Circuit agrees.
Specifically, the court ruled that while the Treasury has the authority to act against 'property,' the core open-source, immutable smart contracts of Tornado Cash cannot be owned by anyone, thus not belonging to the sanctioned 'property.'
In simple terms, the Tornado Cash incident helped the cryptocurrency industry achieve a temporary victory under the 'technical innocence theory.'
It's no wonder that Coinbase's former CTO, renowned cryptocurrency entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, exclaimed: 'Privacy has won. Smart contracts have won. Tornado Cash has won. And OFAC has lost.'
As a member of the Ethereum ecosystem, the privacy application anoncast from the Base ecosystem naturally has its own place.
First, from the ecological positioning perspective, anoncast is one of the 'sovereign individual's toolkit triad.' Previously, Vitalik discussed anoncast alongside this year's hot product, the crypto prediction market Polymarket, stating that both practice the goal of 'cryptocurrency is meant to bring about concrete changes in the world, making it freer, more open, and collaborative'; the anoncast official account also previously stated that it stands alongside Polymarket and Railgun as 'sovereign individual toolkit components,' with the former ensuring individual anonymous speech freedom; the latter two serving as public opinion forecasting and privacy protocols.
Secondly, from the perspective of token market cap, ANON's market potential is still in the early discovery stage. According to Coingecko data, TORN's market cap once approached $150 million, built on a total supply of 10 million tokens, with an actual circulating supply of less than 4 million, and its single token price once reached $436; in contrast, according to GMGN data, ANON's total supply is 1 billion tokens, with a current market cap of only $28 million, and a single token price of just $0.028. Based on the corresponding token supply-to-market cap ratio, ANON's market cap potential is about 5-8 times; the growth space for the single token price is about 10-15 times. Of course, the scope of application of both protocols and their market influence still have certain gaps.
Lastly, from a future growth perspective, anoncast's market flexibility is superior. Born from the Farcaster protocol client Supercast and superanon, anoncast has produced a series of changes while inheriting the Farcaster ecosystem style: for example, its official X platform account has become a 'decentralized anonymous speaking platform'; the integration with Base ecosystem's one-click token issuance application AI Agent Clanker has also opened up possibilities for 'anonymous one-click token issuance'; moving forward, based on the Ethereum ecosystem, Base ecosystem, and Farcaster ecosystem, anoncast will continue to grow and develop, potentially pioneering a path toward a 'decentralized anonymous speech protocol based on open-source development.'
These three major reasons collectively lay a solid development foundation for anoncast and the ANON token. Furthermore, Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero has previously stood up for anoncast multiple times, and Vitalik, in addition to buying tokens, has also discussed related technical details with anoncast's developers @Slokh about 'whether it is possible to create a serverless version of the application.'
anoncast is an open-source protocol
Of course, after attracting so much attention, anoncast, featuring 'anonymous speech + anonymous token issuance' as its main gimmick, is not without its dramatic plots, especially the 'token case sensitivity dispute' that occurred yesterday.
The token case sensitivity storm has resurfaced: anonfun VS ANONFUN?
On November 27, at a time when Clanker was developing rapidly, the official anoncast X platform account, as the 'new star of social applications on Base,' announced — the launch of the anonymous token issuance feature anonfun.
It is reported that 'to issue an anonymous token (anonfun coin), please mention @clanker on anoncast and tell it what you want to publish, such as token symbol, name, and image. If it gets promoted, it will be published on @anonfun and released via Clanker.'
Tweet image
Subsequently, an anonymous community member created the anonfun token through Clanker, stimulated by the same ticker as the application. On November 28 at 2 PM, anonfun's market cap successfully broke 1 million dollars, but soon after, the situation began to take a downturn.
According to Farcaster community member @sylphy's verification, the creator of the anonfun token is not the official anoncast but an account named anonfuntoken (FID: 886516), which later deleted the token issuance tweet, resulting in the loss of anonfun's 'birth certificate.'
On the other hand, the suspected official platform of anoncast, ANONFUN, is about to make its grand entrance (Note: due to the anonymous speaking mechanism of anoncast, we cannot determine whether the creator of ANONFUN is an official member of anoncast).
Around 4 PM on November 28, the community discovered that the official anoncast X platform account and Farcaster account simultaneously published the ANONFUN token and contract address. The project garnered FOMO due to community members speculating it might be released by anoncast officials, with its market cap temporarily soaring to around 2.7 million dollars within a few hours.
The previous anonymous tweets from the official anoncast account have now been deleted.
But similarly, ANONFUN is not necessarily 'officially authentic.'
Subsequently, an anonymous community member posted a clarification stating: 'Let me clarify the facts: anoncast collaborated with clanker, hence on Thanksgiving Day, clanker could only create tokens from the @anonfun account (Note: Clanker had previously announced a temporary closure, waiting for subsequent updates to reopen); 2. Anonymous community members, not developers, launched the ANONFUN token; 3. The token's market cap surpassed 1 million dollars within 15 minutes.'
anonfun vs ANONFUN
According to GMGN data, anonfun's current price has dropped to around $0.000001, with its market cap declining about 90% from its peak to approximately $100,000; ANONFUN's current price has dropped to around $0.000005, with its market cap declining to about 20% from its peak, currently around $538,000.
After anonymous token issuance became a form of 'decentralized power,' the market became a shadow of emotions, and currently, there are no winners in this token case sensitivity dispute.
The future direction of anoncast: Community notes, whistleblower box, or anonymous token issuance platform?
According to the information from the anoncast official website, the posting requirements are as follows:
Holding 5,000 ANON (currently about $135): Post to the anonymous information flow account @rawanon;
Holding 2,000,000 ANON (currently about $54,000): Promote the post to @anoncast and X/Twitter platforms;
Holding 2,000,000 ANON (currently about $54,000): Can delete posts.
anoncast official website interface
At the same time, the anonymous one-click token issuance application anonfun, built on anoncast and Clanker, has also birthed its own 'token ecosystem.'
According to Dune data statistics, the overall market cap of anonfun x Claner v3 related token projects is approximately $3.682 million; the 24-hour trading volume is about $6.779 million, among which ACLANK (0x2b80c582d1e7c6b2c7742c0ed089ac7327f31527) temporarily ranks first with a market cap of $1.8 million; ANONFUN (0x370ec5bcde87c50e89a797db6107eb2e2ffe9f58) ranks second with a market cap of $760,000; ? (0x3fdfef8508deffffefba88c6a15788d2a4feb874) has gone viral with the common meme coin frog symbol, currently with a market cap of about $110,000, ranking third.
Overall, anoncast's future direction has three possibilities:
Firstly, it is the Community Notes that Vitalik has mentioned multiple times (first referred to in July in two posts: once calling it a flagship social cognition technology; once stating that prediction markets and Community Notes are actually very complementary), relying on the power of decentralized communities to annotate a certain event or content, similar to the 'community reader feedback' under some tweets on the X platform; anoncast's anonymity can leverage ZK technology to provide a convenient speaking environment for this type of application.
Secondly, it is to play a role similar to the whistleblower box in the former 'PRISM scandal.' anoncast also has certain achievements in this regard. However, applications of this type are currently limited by the narrow user base of the Farcaster ecosystem, which relatively restricts the scope and user group.
Thirdly, it is to become an anonymous token issuance platform, providing a convenient production environment for anonymous issuers, which can even be termed a 'breeding ground' to some extent, as Clanker has further lowered the barriers to token issuance with the help of AI Agent; not only that, anoncast has also supported optional identity verification, making it convenient for token creators to proceed with 'identity verification' and 'benefit returns.'
Another thought is that if anoncast can continuously leverage the Meme effect, gaining broader dissemination and attention, then the account may become a significant 'cyber attention stronghold'—a 7x24 hour operating 'anonymous billboard,' similar to what many crypto projects have attempted before; of course, this may further fuel 'crypto scam incidents.'
After all, even Musk once stated in 2021: 'Twitter is essentially a billboard for crypto scams.'
Conclusion: ANON is not just a Meme coin, but also a high wall protecting privacy rights.
Subsequently, whether anoncast and ANON can take on the 'new star of the privacy track' mainly depends on whether they can stand out in the following two aspects:
Firstly, whether it can continuously attract the attention and applications of leaders in the cryptocurrency industry such as Vitalik;
Secondly, whether it can play its part in socially significant events with a certain influence.
If the value of the second point can be further developed, anoncast will not just be a chain-based anonymous social application, but rather an 'anonymous protocol' on par with Tornado Cash, the difference being that the latter mainly satisfies 'fund anonymity,' while the former mainly meets 'freedom of speech anonymity' needs.
Thus, ANON will not just be an ordinary 'privacy track Meme coin,' but it will also build a 'cyber high wall protecting freedom of speech and privacy rights.'