Author: Joe, Foresight News

What is clanker? A social meme distribution platform, an AI Agent, a meme.

In November, the Base ecosystem ushered in a new round of explosion, which has continued for at least three weeks, and clanker is one of the most critical links. As of November 26, 2024, the first meme CLANKER issued by clanker has reached a market cap of 70 million USD.

Since November 8, 2024, at least three meme coins with a market cap 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.

The related product behind ANON - anoncast - utilizes the ZK anonymous posting feature, and Ethereum founder Vitalik mentioned anoncast on Warpcast four times in one week and discussed with engineers how to improve this product. Vitalik himself also actively purchased ANON tokens on November 21 to experience the anoncast product. The market sees this as the first time Vitalik has actively purchased meme coins in recent years.

The birth of these memes is inseparable from the help of clanker. Clanker is becoming the 'hit meme' machine in the Base ecosystem.

So, will it continue to create new 'hit memes'? What does it mean 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 Farcaster ecosystem founder @proxystudio.eth. It is mainly used for automated token deployment on the Base network.

As of November 26, 2024, in just two weeks, clanker has issued 3,500 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, describe in words the name, content, and even images 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 the result of a collaboration between two AI agents, namely aethernet and clanker. A Farcaster user named naaate asked the AI agent aethernet from the Higher community to issue a token for him, and aethernet, as an AI, had another AI - clanker issue the token. This signifies a milestone event in the collaboration of AI to issue tokens.

Two AIs successfully issued a token LUM through their dialogue.

The birth of LUM, which reached a market cap of tens of millions of dollars in just a few days, has brought clanker into the sight of the 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 was posted by anonymous users in the anonymous posting account Superanon of the third-party Farcaster client Supercast and deployed through clanker. Later, many users airdropped $ANON to Supercast founder woj, and woj airdropped the obtained $ANON to Supercast users, receiving a wave of positive feedback and enhancing community recognition.'

'Later, builders began to create applications around the ANON token, with the most prominent being the anonymous posting project anoncast.org, which requires holding a certain amount of ANON to post.'

Image source: @0xLuo

And anoncast's anonymous posting feature using zk technology has attracted the attention of Vitalik. In one week, Vitalik posted four pieces of content related to anoncast on Warpcast and purchased ANON tokens, allowing ANON to break further into the mainstream. ANON's market cap has stabilized at 40 million USD.

The success of LUM and ANON has made people realize the value of clanker as two 'hit meme machines' on this platform. As of today, the market cap of CLANKER tokens has surpassed LUM and ANON, reaching 70 million USD.

With all three elements combined, will clanker surpass pump.fun?

Combining the three elements of AI Agent, meme platform, and Web3 social, will clanker surpass pump.fun?

During this cycle, the Meme track has been 'monopolized' by Solana, which is inseparable 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 garnered 1.45 million SOL, approximately 360 million USD in revenue. Thus, pump.fun has become the fastest Web3 application in the history of the crypto industry to earn 100 million USD. The success of pump.fun has directly channeled massive amounts of capital and users into Solana, greatly promoting its development.

In contrast, among the major L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, besides the appearance of Degen and other golden dogs on Base, there haven't been any significant breakout memes. However, the Ethereum ecosystem has not given up on the meme track. Base is hoped to compete directly with Solana by the Ethereum community.

And clanker might just be the pump.fun of the Base ecosystem. However, clanker differs from pump.fun.

First of all, clanker is a product created by engineers of the Web3 social protocol - Farcaster, and is an AI Agent for automatically issuing tokens built on Farcaster. Clanker naturally possesses Web3 social attributes. The behavior of users creating tokens also occurs on Farcaster.

Secondly, as a meme platform, clanker's transaction fees and revenue sharing model differ from the traditional pump.fun.

Clanker's transaction fee model is relatively transparent and fair. Clanker does not charge creation fees when issuing tokens but takes 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 requesters (i.e., users who issue tokens through clanker), and 60% belongs to clanker. In contrast, on pump.fun, users can create tokens at a very low cost, typically 0.02 SOL, but the transaction fee is 1%, and this fee goes entirely to the pump.fun platform operator for maintaining platform operations and providing liquidity.

Finally, clanker pays more attention to the integration with AI technology, actively experimenting and combining AI Agents with products. This is also related to the strong engineering atmosphere of the entire Coinbase group, base ecosystem, and Farcaster ecosystem.

Base, pioneering a new trend of 'application memes'.

Unlike Solana's 'purely gambling memes', Base is pioneering a new trend of 'application memes'. The emergence of clanker represents that Base has already established this new ecological closed loop.

From Degen to Higher, LUNA, Aethernet, LUM, CLANKER, the number of 'application memes' on Base is increasing, and their characteristics are becoming more pronounced, forming a trend, style, and culture.

Base's 'application memes' fall into two categories: 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).

Core members of Base and Farcaster also encourage developers in the ecosystem to create applications while posting memes, even allowing engineers to immediately release their completed products in meme form.

Under the competitive pressure of Solana memes attracting large amounts of capital and traffic, the 'application memes' that Base has pioneered and initially formed will be a good way for the Ethereum system to break through, after all, even with excellent technology and ideas, without substantial funding and user support, sustainable development is impossible.

Both Polymarket and Farcaster share this characteristic of combining the development of truly meaningful applications with elements of gambling, attracting not only genuine believers and users but also a significant number of gamblers and traders in the crypto industry.