Quietly rising to a market value of tens of millions, what is the background of $ANON in the Base ecosystem?

Author: Deep Tide TechFlow

In this wave of Meme frenzy, due to being overshadowed by the Solana ecosystem, even though the Golden Dog frequently appears, 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 on the rise just six days after its launch, reaching a market cap of 22 million at its peak.

Although it cannot compete with the "one-day clearances" of current Solana Memes, the significant rise of $ANON in the Base ecosystem is still worth exploring, especially as the market's attention is more focused on the fervor surrounding BTC and Solana.

Is $ANON a new value narrative or a new layout by a conspiracy group in Base? Deep Tide TechFlow will analyze the ins and outs of $ANON through event sorting.

Supercast and Superanon

The story begins with Polish developer woj (@wojtekwtf) creating the social application product Supercast based on the Farcaster protocol in October 2024. Supercast is an application layer on par with Warpcast, the leading social product in the Base ecosystem. Supercast introduced an anonymous posting feature called Superanon, which allows users to post anonymously through a SuperAnon account using zk proof technology, requiring a membership fee of 10U/month.

Clearly, the ability to post anonymously through Superanon has been well-received by crypto users (or Farcaster ecosystem users). Within just three weeks of its launch, Superanon has already gained over 4,300 followers, with many of the most intense discussions about Farcaster being anonymously posted by users on this account. Developer woj himself is quite proud, stating, "This is my most successful launch in recent times."

Anonymous Users + AI Token Creation, Is $ANON Really a Community Coin?

Since its launch, Superanon has been running smoothly. On November 14, an anonymous user interacted with the AI Agent account @clanker in the Farcaster ecosystem through the Superanon account and successfully launched a MEME coin called $ANON, 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, currently valued at 30 million dollars.)

When woj woke up to find an additional $25,000 worth of $ANON in his wallet, he chose to airdrop all of his $ANON to over a thousand paid Supercast users. (Woj's original words: "This is cool, but I can't fully support it because any Supercast tokens will be distributed to its users.")

Woj's action, embodying the spirit of crypto, was greatly appreciated by the community. Coupled with the built-in "zk + anonymity + AI token creation" buff of $ANON, the community eagerly bought into the narrative of $ANON being sufficiently decentralized. Within less than a day of its launch, $ANON reached a peak market cap of 4.5 million dollars.

At the same time, the community also took practical action to support woj's crypto spirit: holders of $ANON in the Farcaster community voluntarily sent over 40,000 dollars worth of 13 million tokens to the developer for redistribution to Supercast users.

The Case of Uppercase vs Lowercase?

However, shortly after the uppercase $ANON gained traction, the next day woj posted on Warpcast stating that he would change the icon of superanon "?" to a cute dog image, minting it as an NFT on the Zora platform and airdropping it to Supercast members. This NFT could also be converted into lowercase $anon in a token-to-image format. However, he emphasized that "it currently only has collectible value and is purely coincidental with uppercase $ANON," along with a series of "armor" statements.

In other words, just yesterday, woj, who made uppercase $ANON popular through self-validation, the next day released a lowercase $anon…

However, this round of "uppercase vs lowercase" is not as intense as the $Neiro and $eliza cases, or rather, lowercase $anon is not a competitor to uppercase $ANON at all. As of the time of writing, uppercase $ANON's market cap is close to 20 million dollars, while lowercase $anon's market cap hovers around 300,000 dollars, but woj himself is very fond of the lowercase dog image.

The "ANON" Application Layer Begins to Further Differentiate

With both narrative and consensus, woj seems not particularly interested in further use cases for $ANON. However, the community has already come up with new ideas for $ANON.

Twitter user @0xLuo created a classification map for the current "ANON" ecosystem, visually presenting the clear context of current "ANON" projects.

Developers have created new applications based on $ANON, including an anonymous posting application anoncast similar to superanon but specifically for $ANON holders, and an art project Base Colors.

anoncast

anoncast inherits the anonymous posting feature of superanon, but 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 feature requires holding 30,000 $ANON tokens (currently worth about 450 dollars). More advanced features, such as promoting posts to X/Twitter or deleting published posts, require holding 1 million $ANON tokens (currently worth about 16,000 dollars).

Crypto bigwigs are also very interested in anoncast. Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero (@dwr) 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, meaning 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 the uniqueness of anonymous identities, confirming the attribute of "you are you."

Conclusion

From $Degen to $ANON, the "product coins" that have exploded in the Farcaster ecosystem indeed seem to be following a solid and reliable path—tokens are always revolving around the community and users.

However, along the way, it is inevitable that non-community members will enter purely for speculative purposes, which is not necessarily a bad thing for the tokens themselves. The continuous price increase will also allow more "outsiders" to further understand the project itself, thereby retaining more users interested in the community.

The true value of a series of tokens like $Degen and $ANON lies not in short-term market cap fluctuations, but in whether they can 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 transformation from mere frenzied Meme speculation to practical tokens.