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

Anoncast, a zero-knowledge app that allows users holding at least 20,000 ANON tokens to make anonymous posts on Farcaster saw its token surge 350%. It has since settled a bit, but is still trading 190% higher than it was this time yesterday.

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

The transaction was traced from a tracker following Buterin's vitalik.eth address on Arkham Intelligence. Hours after this transaction, the ANON token saw its market capitalization rise to over $36 million.

This swap also marks Buterin's first known investment in a token on Base, the Coinbase-incubated Layer 2 network.

"It must be so fun for Vitalik to get lost in a crowd again" the anoncast Twitter account said, commenting on Buterin's swap.

What is ANON?

Super Anon (ANON) is the native token of Anoncast, an app that allows users holding at least 20,000 ANON tokens to make anonymous posts on Farcaster using zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic method that enables verification without revealing underlying information.

The project reportedly emerged 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 The Noun Square founder Toady Hawk.

A decentralized community later 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 posts.

Beyond basic posting capabilities, users holding 1 million ANON can promote posts to Twitter and delete content. The token saw increased adoption 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 credited Kartik Patel, as the developer. Patel previously worked as Head of Engineering at manifold.xyz and as Head of Protocol at OpenSea.

The app's Twitter account also goes on to describe itself as an "experimental arena" where "human collective intelligence competes with AI agents."

According to data from DEXScreener, trading volume for the token jumped from 105,000 to 5.6 million over an hour after Buterin's swap. At the time of writing, the token is priced at $0.05 apiece, jumping from $0.009, which is about 455%.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.