Author: Wenser, Odaily Planet Daily
With the ruling that 'the U.S. Treasury's sanctions against Tornado Cash's smart contracts are illegal', its token TORN once surged over 10 times to $43, and the privacy track has gained heightened attention once again.
Seizing this opportunity, the anonymous speech application anoncast under the Base ecosystem Farcaster protocol, which previously triggered market FOMO, is also back in the spotlight.
Initially, the project token ANON received investment from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik and Base protocol head Jesse Pollak. Subsequently, Vitalik highly praised its 'great opportunity to showcase the best freedom of speech while avoiding the quagmire of spam and low-quality content'. Yesterday, the application and official X platform account had a farce over the 'ANONFUN vs anonfun token case sensitivity dispute'.
Can anoncast later become the 'new star in the privacy track'? Can the market value of ANON token reach a new high of $100 million? Can anoncast and Clanker spark new ideas? 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 cautiously)
ANON's benchmark token: the leader in the privacy track - TORN
On November 27, the Fifth Circuit Court of the United States court documents showed that the U.S. court ruled that the sanctions against Tornado Cash's smart contracts were illegal.
The news caused an uproar in the industry.
After all, the previous sanctions against Tornado Cash by the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) caused quite a stir, and Tornado Cash founders and core developers Alexey Pertsev and Roman Storm were subjected to government approval or criminal processing in the Netherlands and the U.S. in May and September of this year, respectively, and the project token TORN has seen its price drop from a peak of about $436 to around $2, and now, the privacy track is seeing a turnaround.
Subsequently, this news was also confirmed by Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal, who posted:
Victory for privacy rights. Today, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court ruled that the U.S. Treasury's sanctions against Tornado Cash's smart contracts are illegal. This is a historic victory for cryptocurrency and all those concerned with 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 not be able to continue. No one wants criminals to use cryptographic protocols, but Congress has not authorized the complete blocking of open-source technology because a small number of users are bad people. These sanctions have expanded the Treasury's power to an unrecognizable extent, which the Fifth Circuit also agreed with.
Specifically, the court ruled that although the treasury has the authority to act on 'property', the core open-source, immutable smart contracts of Tornado Cash cannot be owned by anyone, hence do not fall under the sanctions of 'property'.
In simple terms, the Tornado Cash incident has helped the cryptocurrency industry achieve a stage victory on the grounds of 'technical innocence'.
No wonder former Coinbase CTO and renowned cryptocurrency entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan cheered: 'Privacy has won. Smart contracts have won. Tornado Cash has won. And OFAC has lost.'
As a part of the Ethereum ecosystem, the privacy application anoncast naturally has its place.
Firstly, from the ecological positioning perspective, anoncast is one of the 'three heroes of the sovereign individual toolkit'. Previously, Vitalik discussed anoncast alongside this year's popular product crypto prediction market Polymarket, stating that both adhere to the goal of 'cryptocurrency is to effect concrete changes in the world, making it freer, more open, and collaborative'; the anoncast official previously stated that it is ranked alongside Polymarket and Railgun as 'sovereign individual tool components', the former ensuring individuals' freedom of speech in anonymous speech; the latter two are public opinion prediction and privacy protocols.
Secondly, from the perspective of market capitalization, ANON's market potential is still in the early discovery stage. According to Coingecko data, TORN's market cap once approached $150 million, based on a total supply of 10 million tokens, with an actual circulation of less than 4 million tokens, and its single token price once reached $436; in contrast, according to GMGN data, ANON's total supply is 1 billion tokens, and its current market cap is only $28 million, with a single token price of just $0.028. Based on the corresponding token supply to market cap ratio, ANON's market cap potential space is about 5-8 times; the growth space for a single token price is about 10-15 times. Of course, the application scope of both agreements and their market influence still have a certain gap.
Finally, from the perspective of future growth, anoncast's market flexibility is stronger. As an on-chain social application derived from the Farcaster protocol client Supercast and superanon, anoncast has produced a series of changes while inheriting the Farcaster ecosystem style: for instance, its official X platform account has become a 'decentralized anonymous speaking platform'; the combination with the Base ecosystem's one-click token issuance application AI Agent Clanker has opened up imaginative space 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, likely paving the way for a 'decentralized anonymous speech protocol based on open-source development'.
These 3 major reasons together lay a solid development foundation for anoncast and the ANON token. In addition, Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero has previously repeatedly supported anoncast, and Vitalik, besides buying tokens, has also discussed with anoncast's developer @Slokh about 'whether it is possible to create a serverless version of the application' and other related technical details.
anoncast is an open-source protocol
Of course, after attracting so much attention, anoncast, with 'anonymous speech + anonymous token issuance' as its main gimmick, is also not lacking in some dramatic plots, among which the 'token case sensitivity dispute' that occurred yesterday is particularly worth mentioning.
The token case sensitivity storm reignited: anonfun VS ANONFUN?
On November 27, at a time when Clanker was developing vigorously, the official anoncast X platform account announced - the launch of the anonymous token issuance function anonfun.
According to the introduction, '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 promoted, it will be published on @anonfun and released through Clanker.'
Tweet image
Subsequently, anonymous community members created the anonfun token through Clanker, spurred by the same ticker as the application, and anonfun successfully broke through a market cap of $1 million at 2 PM on November 28, but soon, the direction of events began to turn sharply downwards.
According to Farcaster community member @sylphy's investigation, the creator of the anonfun token is not an official anoncast member, but an account named anonfuntoken (FID: 886516), which later deleted the token issuance tweet, directly leading to the loss of anonfun's 'birth certificate'.
On the other hand, the suspected official support from anoncast for ANONFUN is about to debut (Note: Due to anoncast's anonymous speech mechanism, we cannot determine whether the creator of ANONFUN is an official anoncast member).
Around 4 PM on November 28, the community discovered that the official anoncast X platform account and Farcaster account simultaneously posted the ANONFUN token and contract address, causing the project to experience FOMO as community members speculated it might have been posted by anoncast officials, with the market cap briefly soaring to around $2.7 million within a few hours.
The official anoncast account's previous anonymous tweet has now been deleted.
However, ANONFUN is not necessarily 'officially orthodox'.
Subsequently, anonymous community members posted to clarify the facts: 'Let me clarify the facts: anoncast cooperates with clanker, so on Thanksgiving Day, clanker can only create tokens through the @anonfun account (Note: Previously Clanker announced a temporary shutdown, waiting for subsequent updates to reopen); 2. Anonymous community members, rather than developers, launched the ANONFUN token; 3. The token's market value exceeded $1 million within 15 minutes.'
anonfun and ANONFUN
According to GMGN data, anonfun's current price has fallen to about $0.000001, with its market cap dropping about 90% from its peak, currently around $100,000; ANONFUN's current price has fallen to about $0.000005, with its market cap dropping 20% from its peak, currently around $538,000.
As anonymous token issuance becomes a form of 'decentralized power', the market becomes a shadow of emotions, and currently, there seems to be no winner in this token case sensitivity dispute.
Future directions for anoncast: community notes, reporting mailbox, or an anonymous token issuance platform?
According to the official anoncast website, the posting requirements are as follows:
Holding 5,000 ANON (currently about $135): post to the anonymous information stream account @rawanon;
Holding 2,000,000 ANON (currently about $54,000): will promote posts to @anoncast and X/Twitter platform;
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 total market value of anonfun x Claner v3 related token projects is about $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 its common frog symbol for meme coins, currently with a market cap of about $110,000, ranking third.
Overall, there are 3 possible directions for anoncast moving forward:
Firstly, is the Community Notes (社区笔记) that Vitalik has mentioned multiple times (it was first mentioned in July: once referred to it as a flagship social cognition technology; and once stated that prediction markets and Community Notes are indeed very complementary), which relies on the power of a decentralized community to annotate an event or content, similar to 'community reader feedback' found under certain tweets on the X platform; the anonymity of anoncast can leverage ZK technology to provide a convenient speaking environment for this kind of application direction;
Secondly, it will play a role similar to the reporting mailbox in the 'Prism Gate Incident', and anoncast also has a certain potential in this regard. However, such applications are currently limited by the narrow user base of the Farcaster ecosystem, relatively limiting the scope of influence and user group;
Thirdly, it will become an anonymous token issuance platform, providing a convenient production environment for anonymous token issuers, and can even be regarded as a 'breeding ground', after all, Clanker has further lowered the threshold for token issuance with the help of AI Agent; moreover, anoncast has previously supported optional identity verification, making it convenient for token creators to subsequently carry out 'identity verification' and 'benefits return acquisition'.
Another idea is that if anoncast can continue to leverage the meme effect, gaining wider dissemination and attention, then the account may become a significant 'cyber attention high ground' - a 7 x 24 hours operating 'anonymous advertising billboard', just as many previous crypto projects have attempted, though this may also further fuel the emergence of '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 responsibilities of 'new stars in the privacy track' mainly depends on whether they can shine in the following 2 aspects:
Firstly, whether it can continue to gain attention and application from leaders in the crypto industry like Vitalik;
Secondly, whether it can play its role in certain influential social events.
If the value of the second point can be further developed, anoncast will not just be an on-chain anonymous social application, but an 'anonymous protocol' on par with Tornado Cash, with the distinction that the latter primarily satisfies 'fund anonymity', while the former mainly meets the 'freedom of speech anonymity' needs.
Thus, ANON will not merely be an ordinary 'privacy track meme coin'; it will also construct a 'cyber high wall' to protect freedom of speech and privacy rights.