Author: Joe, Foresight News
What is clanker? It is a social meme issuing platform, an AI Agent, and a meme.
In November, the Base ecosystem welcomed a new round of explosion, which has lasted for at least three weeks, and clanker is one of the most critical links in this. As of November 26, 2024, the first meme CLANKER issued by clanker has reached a market value of 70 million USD.
From November 8, 2024, to now, at least three meme coins with a market value of over 10 million USD have been born on clanker: LUM (33 million USD), ANON (46 million USD), CLANKER (70 million USD), and they are still on an upward trend.
Among them, the related product behind ANON - anoncast, utilizes ZK anonymous posting features, and Ethereum founder Vitalik mentioned anoncast four times on Warpcast last week, discussing with engineers how to improve this product. Vitalik himself took the initiative to purchase ANON tokens on November 21 to experience the anoncast product, and the market considers this to be the first time in recent years that Vitalik has actively purchased a meme coin.
The emergence of these memes cannot be separated from the help of clanker. Clanker is becoming a 'hot meme' generator in the Base ecosystem.
So, will it continue to create new 'hot memes'? What is its significance for Farcaster, Base, and even Ethereum?
Clanker has launched three 'hot 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 for automating token deployment on the Base network.
As of November 26, 2024, in just two weeks, clanker issued a total of 3500 tokens and generated 4.2 million USD 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, and even image 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 collaboration between two AI agents to issue tokens, namely aethernet and clanker. A Farcaster user named naaate allowed the AI agent aethernet from the Higher community to issue a token for them, with aethernet as an AI enabling another AI - clanker to issue the token. This marks a milestone event of collaboration between AI and AI in issuing tokens.
Two AIs successfully issued a token LUM while communicating with each other.
The birth of LUM, and reaching a market value of tens of millions of dollars in just a few days, has brought clanker into the sight of Base community members.
Another token issued by clanker, ANON, has brought clanker out of the community, allowing more people to understand the clanker product.
Twitter user @0xLuo stated: 'The ANON token is posted anonymously through clanker deployed by anonymous user Superanon in the third-party client Supercast on Farcaster. Later, many users airdropped $ANON to Supercast founder woj, who then airdropped the received $ANON to Supercast users, receiving positive feedback and enhancing community recognition.'
'Subsequently, builders began to construct application ecosystems around the ANON token, with the most notable being the anonymous posting project anoncast.org, which requires holding a certain number of ANON to post.'
Image source: @0xLuo
Anoncast, by utilizing ZK technology for anonymous posting features, has attracted the attention of Vitalik. In just a week, Vitalik posted four pieces of content related to anoncast on Warpcast and purchased ANON tokens, further pushing ANON into the spotlight. ANON's market cap has also stabilized at 40 million USD.
The success of LUM and ANON has made people realize the value of clanker as a platform for two 'hot meme generators'. As of today, the market value of the CLANKER token has surpassed LUM and ANON, reaching 70 million USD.
With the combination of three major elements, will clanker surpass pump.fun?
Combining the three elements of AI Agent, meme platform, and Web3 social, will clanker surpass pump.fun?
In this cycle, the meme track has been dominated by Solana, which cannot be separated from the success of pump.fun.
pump.fun (Data source: Dune)
Since March 2024, pump.fun has created 3.79 million memes for Solana and has earned approximately 1.45 million SOL, around 360 million USD in revenue. As a result, pump.fun has become the fastest Web3 application in the history of the entire crypto industry to achieve 100 million USD in revenue. The success of pump.fun has directly led to a massive influx of funds and users into Solana, greatly promoting Solana's development.
In contrast, among the major L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, aside from the appearance of Degen and other meme coins on Base, there have not been any major breakout memes. However, the Ethereum ecosystem has not given up on the meme track. Base is expected to compete directly with Solana, carrying the hopes of the Ethereum community.
And clanker may be the pump.fun of the Base ecosystem. However, clanker is different from pump.fun.
First of all, clanker is a product created by the engineers of the Web3 social protocol - Farcaster, which is an AI Agent for automatically issuing tokens built on Farcaster. Clanker inherently possesses Web3 social attributes. The behavior of users creating tokens also takes place on Farcaster.
Secondly, as a meme platform, clanker's transaction fee and revenue-sharing model differ from the traditional pump.fun.
Clanker's transaction fee model is relatively transparent and fair; clanker does not charge a creation fee during token issuance, but will extract fees from transactions. Specifically, clanker creates and locks a full-range Uniswap v3 liquidity pool (LP), with a transaction fee of 1%, of which 40% is allocated to the requester (i.e., users who issue tokens through clanker), and 60% belongs to clanker. In contrast, on pump.fun, users can create tokens for a very low fee, usually 0.02 SOL, but the transaction fee is 1%, which is entirely retained by the pump.fun platform operators for maintaining platform operations and providing liquidity.
Finally, clanker places more emphasis on the integration with AI technology, actively trying various combinations of AI Agents and products. This is also related to the strong engineering technical atmosphere of the entire Coinbase group, Base ecosystem, and Farcaster ecosystem.
Base, pioneering a new trend of 'application-type meme'
Unlike Solana's 'purely speculative meme', Base is pioneering a new trend of 'application-type meme'. The emergence of clanker represents that Base has already connected this brand new ecosystem loop.
From Degen to Higher, LUNA, Aethernet, LUM, CLANKER, the 'application-type memes' in Base are becoming more and more numerous, with increasingly obvious characteristics, gradually forming a trend, style, and culture.
Base's 'application-type meme' is divided into two types: one is memes doing applications, and the other is applications doing memes. The representative of the first type is: Degen, Higher (Aethernet); the representative of the second type is: Farcaster, Virtuals (LUNA), clanker (LUM).
Core members of Base and Farcaster also encourage developers in the ecosystem to create applications while issuing memes, and even engineers themselves create products and immediately issue the completed products in the form of memes.
Under the competitive pressure of Solana meme attracting massive funds and traffic, the 'application-type meme' pioneered and initially formed by Base will be a good way for the Ethereum ecosystem to break through. After all, no matter how good the technology and ideas are, without substantial support from funds and users, sustainable development is impossible.
Whether it is Polymarket or Farcaster, they share the characteristic of combining the development of truly meaningful applications with gambling elements, attracting both genuine believers and a significant number of gamblers and traders in the crypto industry.
