Original title: Quietly rising to a market value of tens of millions, what is the origin of $ANON in the Base ecosystem?
Original author: TechFlow
Marsbit Note: On November 21, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin spent 0.082 ETH to buy 30,303 ANON. An hour later, Base protocol head Jesse Pollak also exchanged 0.333 ETH for 31,529 ANON. As a result, the price of ANON briefly soared, and as of the time of writing, its market value is reported to be 60 million USD.
In this wave of Meme frenzy, because it has always been overshadowed by the Solana ecosystem, even though gold 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 has been rising steadily just six days after its launch, reaching a market value of 22 million at its peak.
Although it can't compare to the current Solana memes' 'one-day clearance', the significant rise of $ANON in the Base ecosystem is still worth exploring, especially with the market's attention increasingly focused on the fervor of BTC and Solana.
$ANON is a new value narrative or a new layout of conspiracy groups in Base? Deep Tide TechFlow sorts through events to analyze the ins and outs of $ANON for you.
Supercast and Superanon
The story begins with Polish developer woj (@wojtekwtf) creating the social product Supercast based on the Farcaster protocol in October 2024. Supercast is an application layer on par with the leading social product Warpcast in the Base ecosystem. Supercast introduced an anonymous posting feature called Superanon, which supports users to post anonymously through SuperAnon accounts via zk proof technology, requiring a membership fee of 10U/month.
Clearly, applications like Superanon that allow anonymous posting are very popular among crypto users (or Farcaster ecosystem users). In just three weeks since its launch, Superanon has already gained over 4,300 followers, and many of the most intense discussions about Farcaster are anonymously published by users on this account. Developer woj 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 AI Agent account @clanker in the Farcaster ecosystem through the Superanon account, successfully issuing a $ANON meme coin and then airdropping 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 released by AI Agent @clanker, with a current market value of 30 million USD.)
Until woj woke up one day to find an extra 25,000 USD worth of $ANON in his wallet, he decided to airdrop all $ANON in his wallet to over a thousand paying Supercast users. (woj's own words: 'This is cool, but I can't fully support it because any Supercast tokens will be distributed to its users.')
woj's highly crypto-spirit-driven move has been greatly appreciated by the community, and with $ANON itself carrying the 'zk + anonymous + AI issuing tokens' version Buff, the community naturally went crazy for the sufficiently decentralized narrative of $ANON. Within less than a day of its launch, $ANON reached a peak market value of 4.5 million USD.
At the same time, the community is also actively supporting woj's crypto spirit: $ANON holders in the Farcaster community voluntarily sent over 40,000 USD worth of 13 million tokens to the developer for redistribution to Supercast users.
The case of upper and lower case letters is back?
However, just as uppercase $ANON was heating up, the next day woj posted on Warpcast that he wanted to change the icon of superanon '?' to that of a cute little dog, minting it as an NFT on the Zora platform and airdropping it to supercast members. Meanwhile, this NFT can be converted to lowercase $anon in a token-to-coin form, but he also emphasized that 'it currently only has collectible value and is purely coincidental with uppercase $ANON' and a series of similar 'layered armor' statements.
In other words, woj, who just promoted uppercase $ANON through self-validation yesterday, posted a lowercase $anon the next day...
However, this round of 'uppercase and lowercase letter dispute' is not as intense as that of $Neiro and $eliza, or rather, lowercase $anon is not a match for uppercase $ANON at all. As of the time of writing, uppercase $ANON's market value is close to 20 million USD, while lowercase $anon's market value is still hovering around 300,000 USD, but woj himself is super fond of the lowercase dog image.
The 'ANON' type application layer is starting to further differentiate.
There is both narrative and consensus, but woj doesn't seem particularly interested in the further use case of $ANON. However, the community has already come up with new ideas for $ANON.
Twitter user @0xLuo created a categorization map for the current 'ANON' ecosystem, visually presenting the clear context of current 'ANON' projects.
Developers have created new applications based on $ANON, including anoncast, an anonymous posting application similar to superanon but dedicated to $ANON holders, and the art project Base Colors.
anoncast
anoncast inherits the anonymous posting feature of superanon, but differs in that users need to hold a certain amount of uppercase $ANON in their wallets to use the 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 USD). Higher-level features, such as promoting posts to X/Twitter or deleting published posts, require holding 1 million $ANON tokens (currently priced at about 16,000 USD).
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 has 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. No two people can own the same color, and no two colors can have the same name.
Developer @0FJAKE states 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 fairly solid and reliable path — that is, tokens are always operating around the community and users.
It's inevitable that non-community members may enter purely for speculative purposes while progressing, which isn't necessarily a bad thing for the token itself. The continuous price increase will allow more 'outsiders' to further understand the project itself, thereby retaining more users interested in the community.
The real value of tokens like $Degen and $ANON does not lie in short-term market fluctuations but in the ability to build a self-organizing and self-evolving ecosystem. This ecosystem can continuously adapt to user needs and evolve under the community's push, ultimately achieving a shift from purely frenzied meme speculation to practical tokens.