anoncast: Can It Become a "New Star in the Privacy Track"?

r, Odaily Planet Daily

With the conclusion of the "US court ruling that the US Treasury Department's sanctions on Tornado Cash smart contracts are illegal", its token TORN once rose more than 10 times to reach $43, and the privacy track has once again attracted high attention.

Taking advantage of this momentum, anoncast, the anonymous speech application under the Base ecosystem Farcaster protocol that had previously caused market FOMO, has also returned to the spotlight.

Initially, the project's token ANON was bought by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik and Base protocol head Jesse Pollak. Later, 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 app and the official X platform account had another farce of "ANONFUN vs anonfun token capitalization dispute."

Can anoncast become a "new star in the privacy track" in the future? Can the market value of ANON token reach a new high of 100 million US dollars? Can anoncast and Clanker create new sparks? Where will anoncast go in the future?

Odaily Planet Daily will discuss the above issues one by one in this article for readers' reference. (Note: The following content does not constitute investment advice, please choose investment targets with caution)

ANON’s counterpart token: TORN, the leader in the privacy track

On November 27, court documents from the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court showed that a U.S. court ruled that sanctions on Tornado Cash smart contracts were illegal.

When the news came out, the industry was in an uproar.

After all, Tornado Cash was previously sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which caused a lot of controversy. Tornado Cash founder and core developer Alexey Pertsev and Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm were also approved or criminally prosecuted by the authorities in the Netherlands and the United States in May and September of this year, respectively. The project token TORN also fell from a high of around $436 to around $2. Now, the privacy track has ushered in a turnaround.

Later, the news was confirmed by Paul Grewal, Chief Legal Officer of Coinbase, who wrote:

Privacy wins. Today, the U.S. Fifth Circuit ruled that the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions against the Tornado Cash smart contract were unlawful. This is a historic victory for cryptocurrency and all those who care about defending freedom.

Now these smart contracts must be removed from the sanctions list, and Americans will once again be allowed to use this privacy-preserving protocol. In other words, the government’s overreach can no longer continue. No one wants criminals using crypto protocols, but Congress did not authorize a complete blockade of open source technology because a small percentage of users are bad actors. These sanctions expand the Treasury Department’s authority beyond recognition, and the Fifth Circuit agreed.

Specifically, the court ruled that while the Treasury Department has the authority to take action against ‘property,’ the open-source, immutable smart contracts at the heart of Tornado Cash cannot be owned by just anyone and therefore are not ‘property’ subject to sanctions.

Simply put, the Tornado Cash incident helped the cryptocurrency industry achieve a temporary victory on the grounds of "technology innocence".

No wonder Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase and a well-known cryptocurrency entrepreneur, cheered: "Privacy wins. Smart contracts win. Tornado Cash wins. And OFAC loses."

As a member of the Ethereum ecosystem, Base ecosystem's privacy application anoncast will naturally have its own place.

First of all, from the perspective of ecological position, anoncast is one of the "three great sovereign personal toolkits". Previously, Vitalik discussed anoncast together with the popular product Polymarket, the crypto prediction market, this year, saying that both of them practiced the goal of "cryptocurrency is to achieve concrete changes in the world and make the world more free, open and collaborative"; anoncast officials also previously issued a statement saying that they are listed as "sovereign personal tool components" together with Polymarket and Railgun, the former ensuring freedom of speech for anonymous individuals; the latter two are public opinion prediction and privacy protocols respectively.

Secondly, from the perspective of token market value, ANON's market potential is still in the early discovery stage. According to Coingecko data, TORN's market value was close to $150 million at one time, based on its total supply of 10 million and actual circulation of less than 4 million. The price of a single token was as high as $436. In contrast, according to GMGN data, ANON's total supply is 1 billion, and its current market value is only $28 million, with a single token price of only $0.028. According to the corresponding token supply: market