Author: Wenser, Odaily Planet Daily

With the conclusion of the "U.S. Court ruling that the U.S. Treasury's sanctions against Tornado Cash smart contracts are illegal," its token TORN surged over 10 times to reach $43, and the privacy sector has once again gained significant attention.

Riding this wave, the anonymous messaging application anoncast under the Base ecosystem's Farcaster protocol, which previously triggered market FOMO, has also returned to 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, stating it "has 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 innovations? 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 cautiously.)

ANON's benchmark token: The leader in the privacy sector—TORN

On November 27, U.S. Fifth Circuit Court documents revealed that the U.S. court ruled the sanctions against Tornado Cash smart contracts by the U.S. Treasury 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 had plummeted from a high of around $436 to about $2, but now, the privacy sector is experiencing a turnaround.

This news was also confirmed by Coinbase's 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 Tornado Cash smart contracts 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 victory for the cryptocurrency industry based on the "technology is innocent" 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 will naturally have its place.

First, from the perspective of ecological positioning, anoncast is one of the "three pillars of sovereign personal tools." Previously, Vitalik discussed anoncast alongside the popular crypto prediction market Polymarket this year, stating that both embody the goal of "cryptocurrency is to bring about concrete changes in the world, making it more free, open, and collaborative"; anoncast's official account also previously stated that it is on par with Polymarket and Railgun as "sovereign personal tool components," with the former ensuring freedom of speech for anonymous individuals, and the latter two serving public opinion prediction and privacy protocols, respectively.

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 price once reached as high as $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 growth potential per token is about 10-15 times. Of course, the application scope and market influence of the two protocols still have some differences.

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 example, 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 the token, has also discussed technical details such as "whether a serverless version of the application can be created" with the developers behind anoncast, @Slokh.

anoncast is an open-source protocol

Of course, after attracting so much attention, anoncast, which primarily promotes "anonymous speech + anonymous token issuance," has not been without its dramatic plot twists, 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 thriving, the official X platform account of anoncast, hailed as the "new star of social applications on the Base chain," announced that it had launched the anonymous token issuance feature anonfun.

According to the announcement, "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."

Tweet image

Subsequently, an anonymous community member created the anonfun token through Clanker, and spurred by the same ticker as the application, anonfun successfully broke the $1 million market cap on November 28 at 2 PM, but soon, the situation took a sharp downturn.

According to Farcaster community member @sylphy's investigation, the creator of the anonfun token was not the official anoncast 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 seemingly official ANONFUN was about to make its debut (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 Farcaster account simultaneously released the ANONFUN token and contract address. The project was speculated by community members to possibly be released by anoncast officials, leading to FOMO, and its market cap surged 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 also not necessarily "officially legitimate."

Subsequently, anonymous community members posted to clarify the facts: "Let me clarify the facts: anoncast collaborates with Clanker, so on Thanksgiving Day, tokens can only be created by the @anonfun account (Note: Clanker had previously announced a temporary shutdown, waiting for subsequent updates to reopen); 2. The ANONFUN token was launched by anonymous community members, not developers; 3. The token's market cap broke $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 significantly, down about 90% from its peak, currently around $100,000; the price of ANONFUN has also fallen to about $0.000005, with its market cap down to 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 platforms;
• 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 created its own "token ecosystem."

According to Dune data statistics, the overall market cap of 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, anoncast has three potential future directions:

First, there is the Community Notes that Vitalik has mentioned multiple times (first referenced in July with two posts: one calling it a flagship social cognition technology; the other stating that prediction markets and Community Notes are actually very complementary), which relies on the power of a decentralized community to annotate a particular event or content, similar to the "community reader feedback" found 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 scandal," where anoncast may have some achievements in this area. However, such applications are currently limited by the narrow user base of the Farcaster ecosystem, which 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 idea is that if anoncast can continue to leverage the meme effect and gain broader dissemination and attention, the account may become a significant "cyber attention stronghold"—a 7x24 hour 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 mixed with 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 level of 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."

In this way, ANON will not merely be an unremarkable "privacy sector meme coin," but will also build a "cyber high wall protecting freedom of speech and privacy rights."

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。