Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
With the conclusion of the case where "a U.S. court ruled that the U.S. Treasury's sanctions against the Tornado Cash smart contract were illegal," its token TORN surged over 10 times to reach $43, bringing renewed attention to the privacy sector. (For details, see the article “Court rules ‘OFAC sanctions against Tornado Cash’ illegal, TORN surges over 10 times”)
Riding this wave, the anonymous messaging 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 purchased by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik and Base protocol leader Jesse Pollak. Subsequently, Vitalik highly praised it for having "a great opportunity to showcase the best of free speech while avoiding the quagmire of spam and low-quality content." Yesterday, the application and its official X platform account were involved in a farcical "ANONFUN vs anonfun token case sensitivity dispute."
Will anoncast become the "new star of the privacy sector"? Can the market cap of the ANON token reach a new high of $100 million? Will anoncast and Clanker spark new synergies? What direction might anoncast take in the future?
Odaily Planet Daily will explore these questions one by one in this article for readers' reference. (Note: The following content does not constitute investment advice; please choose investment targets carefully.)
ANON's benchmark token: The leader in the privacy sector—TORN
On November 27, U.S. Fifth Circuit Court documents showed that a U.S. court ruled the sanctions against the Tornado Cash smart contract illegal.
The news caused an uproar in the industry.
After all, the sanctions against Tornado Cash by the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) had been a hot topic, and Tornado Cash founder and core developer Alexey Pertsev, along with developer Roman Storm, faced government scrutiny or criminal proceedings in the Netherlands and the U.S. in May and September of this year, respectively. The project’s token TORN fell from a peak price of around $436 to about $2, but now, the privacy sector is seeing a turnaround.
The news was also confirmed by Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal, who stated—
Privacy rights have won. Today, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court ruled that the U.S. Treasury's sanctions against the Tornado Cash smart contract are illegal. This is a historic victory for cryptocurrency and for all who care about defending freedom.
These smart contracts must now 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 cannot continue. No one wants criminals to use cryptocurrency protocols, but Congress did not authorize a complete ban on open-source technology just because a small number of users are bad actors. These sanctions expanded the Treasury's power to an unrecognizable extent, and the Fifth Circuit Court agreed.
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 and therefore do not constitute 'property' subject to sanctions.
In simple terms, the Tornado Cash incident has achieved a phased victory for the cryptocurrency industry under the "technology is not guilty" argument.
It’s no wonder that former Coinbase CTO and 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 in the Base ecosystem will naturally have its place.
First, from the perspective of ecological positioning, anoncast is one of the "three pillars of the sovereign individual toolkit." Previously, Vitalik discussed anoncast alongside the popular crypto prediction market Polymarket this year, stating that both embody the goal of “using cryptocurrency to effect concrete changes in the world, making it more free, open, and collaborative”; anoncast's official account also stated that it stands alongside Polymarket and Railgun as "sovereign individual tool components," with the former ensuring freedom of speech for anonymous individuals; the latter two serve as public opinion prediction and privacy protocols (for detailed introduction, see the article “Unveiling Railgun: A privacy service that has handled $2 billion, covering up on-chain money laundering with zk tools”).
Second, from the perspective of market cap, the market potential of ANON 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 circulating supply of less than 4 million, and its token price once reached $436; in contrast, according to GMGN data, ANON has a total supply of 1 billion tokens, with a current market cap of only $28 million and a 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 price per token has the potential to grow about 10-15 times. Of course, the application scope and market influence of the two protocols still have some gaps.
Finally, from the perspective of future growth, anoncast's market flexibility is superior. As an on-chain social application derived from the Farcaster protocol clients Supercast and superanon, anoncast has undergone a series of changes while inheriting the Farcaster ecosystem's style: for instance, its official X platform account has become a "decentralized anonymous messaging platform"; its integration with the Base ecosystem's one-click token issuance application AI Agent Clanker has opened up imaginative 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 paving the way for a "decentralized anonymous speech protocol based on open-source development."
These three major reasons collectively lay a solid foundation for the development of anoncast and the ANON token. Additionally, Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero has previously supported anoncast multiple times, and Vitalik, besides purchasing tokens, has also discussed with the developers behind anoncast @Slokh about “whether a serverless version of the application can be created” and other related technical details.
anoncast is an open-source protocol
Of course, after attracting so much attention, anoncast, which primarily promotes "anonymous speech + anonymous token issuance," is not without its share of dramatic events, particularly the "token case sensitivity dispute" that occurred yesterday.
Token case sensitivity controversy reignited: anonfun VS ANONFUN?
On November 27, at a time when Clanker was developing rapidly, the official X platform account of anoncast announced that it had launched the anonymous token issuance feature anonfun.
It was introduced that "to issue an anonymous token (anonfun coin), please mention @clanker on anoncast and tell it what you want to publish, such as the token symbol, name, and image. If promoted, it will be published to @anonfun and released through Clanker."
Subsequently, an anonymous community member created the anonfun token through Clanker, and stimulated by the same ticker as the application, anonfun successfully surpassed a market cap of $1 million on November 28 at 2 PM. However, soon after, the situation began to take a sharp downturn.
According to verification by Farcaster community member @sylphy, the creator of the anonfun token was not the official anoncast but an account named anonfuntoken (FID: 886516). Later, this account deleted the token issuance tweet, directly leading to the loss of anonfun's "birth certificate."
On the other hand, the suspected official version of anoncast, ANONFUN, was about to make its debut _ (Odaily Planet Daily note: Due to anoncast's anonymous speech mechanism, we cannot confirm whether the creator of ANONFUN is an official anoncast personnel)._
Around 4 PM on November 28, the community discovered that the official anoncast X platform account and the Farcaster account simultaneously published the ANONFUN token and contract address. The project faced FOMO as community members speculated it might be released by anoncast officials, causing its market cap to surge to around $2.7 million within a few hours.
The previous anonymous tweet from the anoncast official account has now been deleted.
However, ANONFUN is not necessarily "officially legitimate."
Subsequently, an anonymous community member posted a reminder stating: “Let me clarify the facts: anoncast collaborates with Clanker, so on Thanksgiving Day, tokens can only be created by the @anonfun account _ (Odaily Planet Daily note: Clanker had previously announced a temporary closure, awaiting updates to reopen);_ 2. The ANONFUN token was launched by anonymous community members, not developers; 3. The token's market cap exceeded $1 million within 15 minutes.”
anonfun and ANONFUN
According to GMGN data, the price of anonfun has now dropped to around $0.000001, with its market cap declining by about 90% from its peak, currently around $100,000; ANONFUN has also seen its price drop to around $0.000005, with its market cap down to about 20% from its peak, currently around $538,000.
As anonymous token issuance becomes a form of "decentralized power," the market has become a shadow of emotions, and in this token case sensitivity dispute, there appears to be no winner.
The future direction of anoncast: Community notes, whistleblower mailbox, or anonymous token issuance platform?
According to information from the anoncast official website, the posting requirements are as follows:
Hold 5,000 ANON (currently about $135): Post to the anonymous information stream account @rawanon;
Hold 2,000,000 ANON (currently about $54,000): Promote the post to @anoncast and X/Twitter platform;
Hold 2,000,000 ANON (currently about $54,000): Can delete posts.
anoncast official website interface
Meanwhile, 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 cap of the anonfun x Clanker v3 related token projects is approximately $3.682 million; the 24-hour trading volume is about $6.779 million, with ACLANK (0x2b80c582d1e7c6b2c7742c0ed089ac7327f31527) temporarily leading with a market cap of $1.8 million; ANONFUN (0x370ec5bcde87c50e89a797db6107eb2e2ffe9f58) ranks second with a market cap of $760,000; 🐸 (0x3fdfef8508deffffefba88c6a15788d2a4feb874) has gained popularity with the common meme coin frog symbol, currently with a market cap of about $110,000, ranking third.
Overall, there are three potential future directions for anoncast:
First, is the Community Notes that Vitalik has mentioned multiple times (it was first referred to in July in two posts: once calling it a flagship social cognition technology; and once stating that prediction markets and Community Notes are actually very complementary), which relies on the power of a decentralized community to annotate a certain event or content, similar to the "community reader feedback" under some tweets on the X platform. The anonymity of anoncast can leverage ZK technology to provide a convenient speaking environment for this type of application;
Second, it could serve as a whistleblower mailbox similar to the "Prism" incident, where anoncast also has potential achievements. However, such applications are currently limited by the narrow user base of the Farcaster ecosystem, which relatively restricts their impact and user group;
Third, it could become an anonymous token issuance platform, providing a convenient production environment for anonymous token issuers, and to some extent, it could be called a "breeding ground," as Clanker has already lowered the threshold for token issuance further with AI Agent; moreover, anoncast has previously supported optional identity verification, facilitating token creators' subsequent "identity verification" and "benefit return acquisition."
Another thought is that if anoncast can continue to leverage the meme effect and gain broader dissemination and attention, then the account may become a significant "cyber attention stronghold"—a 24/7 operating "anonymous advertising billboard," similar to many previous attempts by crypto projects. Of course, 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 a high wall for protecting privacy rights
Whether anoncast and ANON can take on the responsibility of being the "new star of the privacy sector" largely depends on whether they can stand out in the following two aspects:
First, whether they can continue to attract the attention and application of leaders in the crypto industry like Vitalik;
Second, whether they can play a role in significant social events with a certain influence.
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 meets the need for "fund anonymity," while the former primarily satisfies the demand for "freedom of speech anonymity."
Thus, ANON will not merely be an ordinary "privacy sector meme coin," but will also build a "cyber high wall protecting freedom of speech and privacy rights."
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