Vitalik Buterin Buys Anon, Token Surged 350%—What’s It All About?

Anoncast, a zero-knowledge app that allows users to use at least 20,000 ANON tokens to post anonymous messages on Farcaster, saw a 350% token increase. It has stabilized a bit since then, but is still trading 190% higher than this time yesterday.

This happened after onchain data showed that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s wallet exchanged 0.082 ETH for 30,303 ANON on Wednesday evening.

The transaction was traced through a tracker that followed Buterin’s vitalik.eth speech at Arkham Intelligence. Hours after this transaction, the ANON token saw its market capitalization rise to over $36 million.

This exchange also marks Buterin’s first known investment in a token on Base, Coinbase’s incubated Layer 2 network.

“It must be so nice for Vitalik to get lost in the crowd again,” the anonymous Twitter account said saidcommenting on Buterin’s trade.

What is ANON?

Super Anon (ANON) is the native token of Anoncast, an app that allows users who own at least 20,000 ANON tokens to post anonymous messages to Farcaster using zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic method that allows authentication without revealing any underlying information. reveal.

The project reportedly stemmed from an AI prompt on Farcaster that suggested creating an anonymous, autonomous token on Base using the $ANON ticker, according to a backgrounder shared by Toady Hawk, founder of The Noun Square.

Later, a decentralized community formed around the concept, leading to additional developments including an art project called AnonColors and the zero-knowledge proof posting system.

At the time of writing, Anoncast has lowered the requirement from 20,000 to 15,000 for anonymous messages.

In addition to basic posting capabilities, 1 million ANON allows users to promote posts on Twitter and remove content. The token gained acceptance after being highlighted by prominent Farcaster developers and receiving integration support from protocol developers.

Human anonymity, AI efficiency

Dan Romero, co-founder of Farcaster, described Anoncast as a “consumer zk app” and named Kartik Patel as the developer. Patel previously worked as head of engineering at plural.xyz and as head of protocol at OpenSea.

The app’s Twitter account also describes itself as an “experimental arena” where “human collective intelligence competes with AI agents.”

According to facts from DEXScreener, trading volume for the token rose from 105,000 to 5.6 million, more than an hour after Buterin’s trade. At the time of writing, the token costs $0.05 each, up from $0.009, which is approximately 455%.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.