What is the background of $ANON in the Base ecosystem, which has quietly risen to a market value of tens of millions?

Author: Shenchao TechFlow

In this wave of Meme frenzy, due to being overshadowed by the Solana ecosystem, even though golden dogs keep appearing, the Memes of the Base ecosystem still seem to be 'quietly rising'.

In the past few days, a coin called $ANON in the Base ecosystem, which has only been online for six days, has risen continuously, reaching a peak market value of $22 million.

Although it cannot compare to the current Solana Memes' 'one-day clearance', in the current market where attention is more focused on the fervor of BTC and Solana, the significant rise of $ANON in the Base ecosystem is still worth exploring.

Is $ANON a new value narrative or a conspiracy group's new layout in Base? Shenchao TechFlow sorts through events to analyze the origins and developments of $ANON for you.

Supercast and Superanon

The story begins with the Polish developer woj (@wojtekwtf) creating the social application Supercast based on the Farcaster protocol in October 2024. Supercast is on the same level as Warpcast, the top social application in the Base ecosystem. Supercast introduced an anonymous posting feature called Superanon, which supports users to post anonymously through SuperAnon accounts using zk proof technology, but requires a membership fee of 10U/month.

Clearly, applications like Superanon that allow anonymous posting are very popular among crypto users (or Farcaster ecosystem users); within just three weeks of its launch, Superanon already has over 4,300 followers, with many of the most intense discussions about Farcaster being anonymously published by users on this account. Developer woj himself is also very proud, stating, 'This is my most successful launch recently.'

Anonymous users + AI issuing tokens, could $ANON really be a community token?

Since its launch, Superanon has been running smoothly. On November 14, an anonymous user interacted with the AI Agent account @clanker through the Superanon account and successfully issued a $ANON MEME token, 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 launched by AI Agent @clanker, currently with a market capitalization of $30 million.)

Until woj woke up one day to find an extra $25,000 worth of $ANON in his wallet, he chose to airdrop all $ANON in his wallet to more than a thousand paying users of Supercast. (Woj's original words: 'This is cool, but I can't fully support it because any Supercast token will be distributed to its users.')

Woj's very crypto-spirit action has won great appreciation from the community, coupled with the fact that $ANON itself comes with the version Buff of 'zk + anonymity + AI issuing tokens', the community naturally went crazy for the narrative of $ANON being sufficiently decentralized, and within less than a day, $ANON's highest market value reached $4.5 million.

At the same time, the community is also actively supporting the encryption spirit of woj: $ANON holders in the Farcaster community voluntarily sent over $40,000 worth of 13 million tokens to redistribute to Supercast users.

Is the uppercase and lowercase struggle back?

However, not long after the capitalized $ANON had heated up, the next day woj posted on Warpcast stating that he would change the icon of superanon '?' to a cute dog image, to be minted as an NFT on the Zora platform and airdropped to Supercast members. At the same time, this NFT can be converted into lowercase $anon in a token form. But he also emphasized that 'currently it only has collectible value, and is purely coincidental with capitalized $ANON,' among other series of 'armored' statements.

In other words, the day after woj just raised the capitalized $ANON by self-endorsement, he himself released a lowercase $anon...

However, this round of 'uppercase and lowercase struggle' is not as intense as that of $Neiro and $eliza, or rather, lowercase $anon is completely not a match for capitalized $ANON. As of the time of writing, capitalized $ANON's market value is nearly $20 million, while lowercase $anon's market value is still hovering around $300,000, but woj himself is super fond of the lowercase dog image.

The 'ANON' application layer is beginning to further differentiate.

There is both narrative and consensus, but woj seems not particularly interested in further use cases for $ANON. However, the community already has new ideas for $ANON.

Twitter user @0xLuo created a categorized guide for the current 'ANON' ecosystem, intuitively showcasing the clear context of current 'ANON' projects.

Developers have created new applications based on $ANON, including anoncast, an anonymous publishing application similar to superanon but exclusively for $ANON holders, and the art project Base Colors.

anoncast

anoncast inherits the anonymous posting function of superanon, but unlike that, users need to hold a certain amount of capitalized $ANON in their wallets to use this application, unlocking different features based on the amount held.

The most basic posting function requires holding 30,000 $ANON tokens (currently priced at about $450). More advanced functions, such as promoting posts to X/Twitter or deleting published posts, require holding 1 million $ANON tokens (currently priced at about $16,000).

Crypto bigwigs are also very interested in anoncast. Dan Romero (@dwr), co-founder of Farcaster, has tweeted and retweeted about anoncast multiple times, and Vitalik Buterin also discussed technical details with anoncast developer @Slokh on Warpcast.

Base Colors

Base Colors is an NFT collection of internet colors. Each color is unique, and owners can name them on the blockchain, with no two people owning the same color, and no two colors having the same name.

Developer @0FJAKE stated that unique colors can establish uniqueness for anonymous identities, confirming the attribute of 'you are you'.

Summary

From $Degen to $ANON, the 'product tokens' that have exploded in the Farcaster ecosystem indeed seem to be following a quite solid and reliable path—tokens are consistently operating around the community and users.

It is just that along the way, it is inevitable that non-community members will enter purely for speculative purposes, which is not necessarily a bad thing for the token itself; the continuous price increase will allow more 'outsider' users to further understand the project itself, thereby retaining more users interested in the community.

Tokens like $Degen and $ANON's true value does not lie in short-term market fluctuations, but in whether a self-organizing, self-evolving ecosystem can be built. This ecosystem can continuously adapt to user needs and evolve under the community's push, ultimately achieving a transformation from mere frenzied Meme speculation to a practical token.