Unchained - Vitalik Buterin Aped Into the Social Media App Anoncast. What's It About? - Ep. 741

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

Farcaster-based social media app Anoncast has quickly grabbed the crypto community’s attention—especially after Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin jumped in.  The platform allows users to speak freely while ensuring no one—not even the platform itself—can trace their identity. And in its short week-and-a-half lifespan, it’s already generated thousands of posts.  In this lighter, Black Friday edition of Unchained, developer Kartik Patel joins to discuss how Anoncast works and why the platform has taken off so quickly. He shares insights on the challenges of maintaining anonymity in a connected world, how AI intersects with these developments, and what it was like to “nerd-snipe” Buterin. Show highlights: What sparked the rise of Anon and how it evolved into a ZK-powered anonymous posting platform Kartik’s favorite casts and what he likes about the platform Why the platform has evolved so quickly  How users can make casts How Anoncast completely protects the anonymity of all posters Kartik’s background in crypto and how he came to be involved in Anoncast Why it felt like a “dream” when Vitalik Buterin bought the ANON memecoin How AI is intersecting with this new era of social media Why Anoncast moderates the posts The new feature that was designed to give credit back to users Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com Thank you to our sponsors! Polkadot Guest Kartik Patel, developer of Anoncast Links Decrypt: Vitalik Buterin Buys Anon, Token Surged 350%—What's It All About? Viral cast possibly about the Ethereum Foundation selling ETH Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:13 How Anoncast became a ZK-powered anonymous platform 05:02 Kartik’s favorite casts and why they stand out 06:44 Why Anoncast has caught on so quickly 07:32 How Anoncast technically enables anonymous posting 11:40 How anonymity is protected on Anoncast 13:28 Kartik’s story and future plans for app development 15:19 Vitalik Buterin’s surprising interaction with Anoncast 16:56 The role of AI in the new era of social media 20:03 Why Anoncast moderates the posts 21:45 A new feature so users can take credit  23:42 Crypto News Recap Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I mean, that was like a dream. Like having been like in the Ethereum community for like a long time now, just like, yeah, having Vitalik user app is kind of just insane. And I was like jumping up. But you could tell by what you could ask my wife. But yeah, it was insane. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained.

You're a no high resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, author of the Cryptopians. I started having crypto nine years ago and as a senior editor at Forbes was the first, Main Tree Meter Porter to get up for cryptocurrency full-time. This is the November 29th, 2024 episode of Unchained. Pocodod is the original and leading layer zero blockchain with over 2,000-plus developers, and the Pocodot 2.0 upgrade will be a massive accelerator for the ecosystem. Join the community at Pogo dot.network slash ecosystem slash community.

Today's guest is Kartik Patel, the developer of a non-cast. Welcome, Kartik. Hey, thanks for having me. So just a quick note before we start, we are recording this on Monday due to the Thanksgiving holiday. So if anything crazy happens between now and Friday, you will understand why we didn't mention it in this interview. So Kartik, you're the developer of this new phenomenon that actually just launched last week, but it has people super excited and it's got multiple components, anoncast, super anon, the beam coin, which decrypt to actually,

actually reported was the first coin that Vitalik Bouturant bought on base. So tell us what all these things are. Yeah, the lore behind all of this is kind of crazy and hard to follow a little bit. Anon specifically originated from Farcaster. If you're familiar with Farcaster, there are many clients that link into the protocol and provide an app experience. One of these clients is called Supercast. It's probably the most popular outside of Warpcast. And there, they have an anonymous account that's called Super Anon, and someone launched an Anon token there anonymously via token launcher bot. Following that, the creator of Supercast kind of disowned the token, didn't really want

anything to do with it. But the community started to rally around the Anon token, especially around, like, specifically around like the lore behind the anonymous launch, kind of like going back to like Satoshi vibes where nobody knows who created it. And so, like, over the ensuing days, like, people kind of got together and tried to figure out, like, what we could, what could we do with this non-token to kind of build more around it and kind of have it diverge away from the super non brand, particularly because, like, a lot of these, a lot of like the initial contributors, initial holders are like friends with the creator of Supercast. And so we wanted to, like, do it in an amicable way where everyone is still happy at the end. So yeah, that's kind of where the token comes from. from. And then as like we were talking, we kind of decided to build this anoncast platform where people can post anonymously using ZK proofs. And so it's provable anonymity versus in super anon. It wasn't ZK based. And so the creator could still see who actually posted anonymously.

Okay. So so basically the parts that now your kind of project involves are anoncast and then the and non-memecoin, is that okay? That's correct. Yeah, tell us like what, you know, what exactly you created and how it works and what people have been doing with it. Yeah, so basically about a week ago, we decided to create an on-cast.

There used to be a FARCaster account where you could post an honestly called 33 bits. And so in order to just launch something quickly, we decided to take a lot of inspiration from them on how they developed their ZK tech and just kind of forked it. And since then, we've kind of been building more features on top of it.

The inspiration behind it was just like an unon token. Like we were thinking, like, what could we do? And the first thing that comes to mind is just let's post anonymously. And as we've been building it, we kind of realize that there's probably a lot more things we can do around this like primitive of anonymity. And specifically around like ZK consumer applications that haven't really been like thought through or built out as of yet. And what has surprised you most about how people have been using it? Yeah, I think like the most surprising thing that we didn't initially think of is we, like, we saw that a lot of people were obviously posting hot takes and spicy takes to try to just like get attention to the account. But a few people have like with low like followers or low distribution on their main accounts have actually been using it as a way to just like talk to people and have actually like reengagement from others, which was, which was surprising to see.

And I think I think it makes sense is that like when you like when you're like a new. person on the new social network. You don't have that big of a distribution, but this kind of, this is kind of something you can just hook into to get your thoughts out. And what are some of the favorite cast that you've seen? Yeah. So, I mean, there's, there's like, there's a few. I think, like, some of my favorites are just, like, the images that people are creating around the brand. I think, like, a lot, there's like a creative community that's forming around the question mark, which I think is really cool. Which is the profile tick, the question mark. Yeah. I think some of the other ones are, they're kind of just like playing off of existing meme coins and like building like, I don't want to show any meme coins right now, but like playing off existing ones and like kind of bringing the anonymity part of it to kind of make some fun content.

Ultimately, I think like my, the thing I love about in Oncast is like it's just fun content and it's like fun things to consume. I mean, some of them are quite gossipy and spicy too, actually. Yeah, I think one went viral on Twitter around the Ethereum Foundation selling. It'll be very clear that the Ethereum Foundation has like selling pressure by the end of the year or something like that. That was kind of insane. And then I know like there's some people trying to stir up beef between base slash Ethereum and Salana. That's also funny. Yeah.

And like honestly, I have to say it shocked me just how much people have been using it because I tried to scroll back. to see when the first cast was sent. And I was scrolling for a long time. And I only made it back like four days. And then I just gave up. I was like, forget I'm never going to get eight days ago. Yeah. Or however many days ago was.

I think we've been, it's like it's about to be a week since we launch in a few hours. And in total, we've had over 3,000 casts already. So. Yeah. So why do you think it's catching on so quickly? I think it's just that there's no like outlet for like anonymous posts. now. Like, if you think about it, like, where would you go where you can, like, post your thoughts and actually have people read them? And I think, like, there's like a flywheel effect here where, like,

as the on on-cast brand and distribution and follower network grows, more people are, like, enticed to post to it because they get more eyeballs on the things that they post, right? So, yeah. And I think, like, I think particularly we have this system in place where, like, you're initially, like everything goes to Farkaster, and then the best of the best content gets posted to Twitter by certain requirements based on-holders. So I did see that, that like basic, well, so actually, before we get there, why don't you talk us through? So let's say that I'm somebody, or anybody as somebody who wants to post an anonymous tweet or cast on Farkaster using a non, a non-cast. Sorry. Yeah. So many words. Yeah. Then, you know, how do we?

do it. Like how many coins do we need? Like where do we go? You know, all of that stuff. Yeah. So we have this web app called anoncast.org. You need 5,000 on on to post on Farcaster. And then anything goes on Farcaster. There's no censorship. There's no deletions. Basically, it's just the raw feed of things that people are posting. The reason we chose Farcester is a lot of us are Farcaster native. And it's really easy to plug in. And we still want to give some level of distribution to the raw content because we have people that are using Warpcast and just like looking through that feed

in order to actually like build like a brand that isn't just spammy and like a bunch of degenerate content whether it's like racism porn or whatever we wanted to make sure that there is some curated layer to this as well and so we have an account on Varkaser called on Bangers and then also the real like meat of this is this Twitter account that's also called Anoncast and anyone that has skin in the game has 2 million anon can actually promote posts from Varkaster to Twitter.

And we think of this is like an interesting incentive game where like you have money in anon. And so the brand is backed by this token. And so you are incentivized to promote the best content and make sure that it's moderated so that obviously your token holdings stay with value. So basically you have to pay more to get it onto Twitter. Basically, so the initial cast goes out on a non-cast on Farcaster. But then when you say, is it the best of the best that goes to Twitter? Or is it just anybody who pays the extra can post it to Twitter? Actually, anyone that holds the amount of tokens required, which is $2 million,

can post whatever they want from a non-cast to Twitter. So if you post something and I have enough balance, can post your tweet for you. You don't, you don't, you personally don't have to post it. Okay. And you do that from the Farcaster client or they do it from the Anoncast client? Yeah, exactly. Okay. Okay. And then, and then are you basing that threshold basically on like the dollar conversion of the coin? Is that it? So I mean, the threshold is just a number that we thought like seemed reasonable. It's kind of hard because like when we first started last week, versus now, like, the price has kind of fluctuated pretty significantly.

And so, yeah, we're kind of still revisiting what, like, what is that right system in place? Like, whether it's, like, changing the numbers or, like, some people have proposed, maybe we introduce, like, a weighted voting system where people can upvote different posts. And once it reaches some threshold, it automatically gets posted Twitter, just so, like, whales aren't kind of in control of all the content. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. So in a moment, we're going to talk a little bit more about, you know, just how viral this is and where it's going. But first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible.

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Get your Web3 ideas to market fast. Think big, build bigger with Pocod. Join the community at poca dot network slash ecosystem slash community. Back to my conversation with Kartik. So just understand the kind of anonymity aspect. So you created this, or whoever you're working with, guys created this front end and it uses zero knowledge technology to hide the identity,

I guess, from the world. But does it also hide it from you? Yeah. Nobody can tell who wrote what post, even us. The zero knowledge proofs are constructed like on the clients or on the web app. And none of that data, none of that identifying data is actually sent to any servers. Just that proof is sent to the servers. And once that proof is validated on the server, we then send out the post. And so, yeah, there's no identifying information that said. We don't even collect any metrics or analytics on the site just because we wanted to stay as pure as we can to anonymity. And if somebody accidentally uses a wallet that is doxed, then could their identity be traced to any particular cast? No. So even with, I use a doxed wallet. I think most people use a doxed wallet.

But the proofs don't actually contain anything related to what wallet posted this. It just validates that you meet the balance requirements. Oh, okay. But if it's showing that the balance is decreasing at the same time that a cast goes out, like that's not a way to connect them? I mean, no. I mean, that could be. But there's no way to know that the person that actually is selling is, oh, so actually

this might be the confusion point is like there isn't actually like a deduction and balance when posting. It's simply a hold requirement. And that's, that's particularly because exactly what you're asking for is like, yeah, if we did a deduction, then like, it's very easy to kind of link that. We're actually talking to some very, like, much smarter ZK people than me about like, how can we actually accomplish balanced deductions without, like, without doxing people, right? Okay. So you talked a little bit about kind of the origin, but like, you know, why did you get involved? I know you've been working crypto for a while. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and like,

what about this particular idea captivated you? Yeah. So, I mean, I've been working crypto since 2020. I worked on some D5 protocols for a bit. In 2021, I joined OpenC and stayed there since 2020-t, until 2020. At OpenC, I led the protocol team. So built teams around all of our crypto tech, building our smart contracts, our indexers or metadata systems, kind of all the things that makes NFTs, NFTs.

And then I left about. about a year and a half ago, kind of like floated around a bit and just decided I wanted to build something. And so like the last year has just been a lot of exploring. I was actually like building an app for the last two months and it has nothing to do with what Anoncast is. I just got of saw a lot of energy around the Anon community last week and was just like this this project probably will take like six to eight hours and I can afford that. And it's fun for me to like take a break from like just the endless stretch of building an app and just like do something else for a little bit. And so that's what I did. I did not expect it to grow as much as it did. And now I've just like,

last week I've just spent my entire time on an oncast. Are you going to go back to the other app? Or are you just? That is a very tough decision to make and I have not made it yet. At least for now, I'm just like riding the wave and I'm totally fine with just working on an oncast for the time being. And kind of just like taking it like day by day and seeing seeing how it goes. We'll see. Maybe there's like an end state that I can leave an Anacastat. And actually, over the last few days, we've been getting more and more open source contributions. So, like, there might be like a, like a middle ground where like there's enough outside dev energy that like I can also like shift time to building kind of both. Right. Well, you know,

we alluded to this earlier, but also very early on Vatolic bought this meme coin. And I wondered how you felt when you saw that. Yeah, I mean, that was like a dream. Like, I could, like, having been, like, in the Ethereum community for, like, a long time now, I've only worked in crypto for, like, since 2020, but, like, I've been in crypto for a long time before that. So, like, just, like, yeah, having Vitalik user app is kind of just insane. I was, like, jumping up. But you could tell by, you could ask my wife. But, yeah, it was insane. I actually, like, I think, like, what was really cool is, like, he, he, like, post. did a few casts, not unawes, just through his main account, like, giving us ideas and, like,

really, like, analyzing the tech and, like, just, like, being excited about it. And I think, I don't know, just, like, being able to nerds, knife, Vitalik is, like, just feels so good. Well, so one other thing is, you know, as we mentioned, this uses your knowledge technology, which, you know, as we mentioned, it allows people to prove knowledge of about data without having to reveal what that data is. And apparently, I guess the early Twitter account kind of gave a nod to the other big tech trend in crypto right now, which is crypto and AI. DeCript reported that, I guess, like early on last week, the Twitter account said that

and intended to be, quote, an experimental arena where human collective intelligence competes with AI agents. So I was curious, like, just why you were saying that? So like, I mean, first of all, the beauty of Anoncast and just Anon in general is it's not just me. And so I don't even control the Twitter accounts. I just post to them through our servers. Don't actually know. I actually didn't even know that it said until right now.

There's actually like a good amount of like a core community around probably 20 or so that are like just doing various things. There's even actually like a separate project, kind of like a side project to Anoncast that like is. is about to be released that I'm not even working on. And I think all of this together is just like what makes it more fun. If I had to guess, the AI part probably comes from like the origins of the token itself because like I mentioned, it was created on a separate, an on account on Audustbley, but the token launcher is called Clanker on Farcaster. And that's actually an AI bot that launches tokens.

And so there's like a lot of these like meme trends that are. kind of coinciding into one here. Overall, it's just like a, I think it's just like a very fun time. Yeah, honestly, like when I was doing research, I, and even like the last several days, I kept seeing this clanker thing and I was like, what is that? So thank you for explaining that. Well, you know, here we are just talking about this new app that's using ZK technology, but, you know, we haven't really seen it being used in a big way. So are there other thoughts that you have about how it could be used that, you know, you haven't quite seen yet? Yeah, I've actually spent a few months, like just exploring ZK tech.

I personally am just motivated by building consumer apps and have been like kind of looking for what is like the next like cutting edge tech that we can build like basically like novel experiences for, right? And to me Zika is like very interesting. It's still like a bit slow. Like if you try to post on on a cast, it takes like 20, 20 seconds to post. But like that is improving rapidly. And over time, I think that's going to get very fast where like you can do very fast ZK proofs.

Yeah, the design space is like, it's actually just like net new, right? Like there's been no real apps. And so that's part of just like what's exciting is just like trying out things and seeing what works. So anonymous posting is one. There's things like maybe you can do anonymous posts with like verified badges without revealing who you are. So like I work for this company and I'm posting about this company, but you don't know who I am. right? And a lot of like cool things like that are enabled about from like ZK and specifically like this new field around ZKTLS. Which is ZKTLS? It's a ZKTLS is proving web two data in a verify,

like a verifiable way. You can bridge data over and generate these proofs around it. So for example, if you're if you've taken a thousand Uber rides, you can verify, you could prove that you've taken a thousand Uber rides without revealing what your Uber account is. And this is all without the permission of Uber. And that gets really interesting. Wow, that is very interesting. Well, something else that I wanted to ask about was in the instructions for posting, it says, quote, do not post porn, docks, shills, or threats. This is not about censorship resistance. It's about great anonymous posts. And I'm sure you've seen with Pump. Fund that things can go off the rails in crypto really quickly. So I wondered if someone were to post one of those things that you're

discouraging them from posting, then what could a non-cast do about it, if anything? Yeah, so we're being a bit more conservative right now in that aspect. We have a moderation system in place. And so we will basically try our best to block those things for being posted. Obviously, some may go through. And again, like, this is why we up front mention is like it's not about censorship resistance. And so if someone does post that, we will delete it. I think ultimately, like, there's probably like a few people who just want to ruin everyone's fun. And I think most people don't necessarily care that porn or racism is being deleted. They just want to continue having fun with the account as they've been having.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Shortly before we started recording, Pumped Up Fun turned off at streaming. So clearly, yeah, they're, I think, realizing they probably need to do something similar. And out of curiosity, how much kind of, you know, of these prohibitive. things have you seen that have been posted? Like, how many deletions have you had to do? I mean, we've only done one, and that's because someone posted some naked woman,

and that was it. And we deleted that, and we've not seen that ever since. Oh, wow. Okay. All right. Well, I mean, I would say that we won't see that, but for now, we've only seen one. Yeah, yeah, probably because it's still, you know, small. Well, so I saw that there's a new feature called Reveal that I think you're going to be launching. Tell us what that is and why you decided to implement that. Yeah, so I think that's like the first like big feature we launched on Anoncast since like just like making stability improvements. We launched that yesterday. Basically what Reveal allows is you can create anonymous posts and have a secret phrase attached to it that you can prove that you were the one that posted it at a later date.

We think that's really interesting because there's. like this like gamification element where you post anonymously just post your raw thoughts and maybe something really takes off and you see a lot of people agreeing with you on it. And then at that point, you can claim credit for that post and like say that you were the one that posted it and bring all that attention kind of back to your main account. Bragging rights. Bragging rights. Well, and what are your longer term goals with it?

Like I know it's so new, but, you know, I don't know if you've thought about where to take it. Yeah, so reveals is actually really interesting, and like a few people have been like kind of thinking about this is when you have this reveal mechanism, people can incentivize others to reveal themselves. And especially like if you post something spicy and someone has a million dollar bounty on you proving that you put someone saying that I posted this, that could be enticing to some people to like basically take like credit themselves as the poster. in exchange for some monetary value. We're experimenting with how to better enable that, but that seems like an interesting design space. All right. Well, this has been super fun.

Thank you so much for sharing on Unchained. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Don't forget. Next up is the weekly news recap today presented by Wondercraft AI. Stick around for this week in crypto after this short break. Welcome to this week's Crypto Roundup. In today's recap, we'll cover the court ruling that overturned sanctions on tornado cash,

Pumpdot Fund's shutdown of its controversial live stream feature, a whistleblower claim against Binance, and Cracken's decision to close its NFT marketplace. We'll also dive into Celsius's $127 million creditor payout, how an AI meme coin coin creator fueled record transactions on Coinbase's base, micro-strategy's latest massive purchase of Bitcoin, and tethers move to discontinue its Eurostable coin. Thanks for tuning in to the weekly news recap. Let's begin. Court overturns sanctions on tornado cash. In a pivotal ruling for the crypto industry,

the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has declared U.S. Treasury sanctions on tornado cash unlawful. The sanctions imposed in 2022 by the Office of Foreign Assets Control accused the cryptocurrency mixer of laundering over $7 billion in digital assets, including $455 million. linked to the North Korean hacking group Lazarus. Judge Don Willett, writing for the three-judge panel, determined that Tornado Cash's self-executing smart contracts could not be classified as property and therefore fall outside OFAC's regulatory authority

under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Willett acknowledged the real-world downsides of unregulated technology, but noted that updating the law is Congress's responsibility, not the judiciaries. The challenge against the sanctions was spearheaded by six tornado cash users, with backing from Coinbase. Paul Gruel, Coinbase's chief legal officer, hailed the decision on X as a historic win for crypto and liberty. Similarly, crypto lawyer Jake Chervinsky described it as a stunning victory for decentralization. Hours after the court overturned tornado cash sanctions, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin donated $1 million in Ether to Coin Center,

the think tank that has helped lead the industry's fight against the tornado cash sanctions. Pump. Dot Fun suspends live streaming after series of controversial incidents. Pump. Dot Fun, the Solana-based platform that enables users to create and promote meme coins, has indefinitely suspended its live streaming feature following a slew of troubling broadcasts. The feature, introduced in August, allowed creators to engage audiences by live streaming their reactions to token price movements. However, recent events exposed its misuse, leading to the platform's decision to disable it temporarily. Those events included numerous live streams that included threats of violence and other extreme acts. In one case, a user threatened to harm his pet if his token did not reach a specific market cap.

Another broadcast featured a staged suicide attempt that was later revealed to be a hoax, intended to promote the creator's meme coin. Despite no actual harm actually occurring, these incidents triggered. widespread condemnation, pump. Dot funds team addressed the issue in a statement, saying that, to ensure the absolute safety of our users, we will be pausing the live streaming functionality until the moderation infrastructure is ready to handle heightened activity. The platform also plans to increase transparency in its moderation processes.

The platform has grown rapidly, with over 3.8 million tokens created since its January launch. However, the live-streaming controversies highlight the challenges of managing user-generated content. Ex-Binance Executive alleges bribery and retaliation in whistleblower case. A former Binance Executive has filed a whistleblower claim in the UK, alleging that a colleague solicited a bribe to fast-track a customer's onboarding process. Bloomberg reported. Amrida Srivastava, who joined Binance in April 20-22 after working at MasterCard, claimed she was unfairly dismissed after reporting the bribery incident

in April, 2003. Shrivastava alleged that a fellow Binance employee accepted money under the guise of providing consultancy services, all while concealing his affiliation with the company. The colleague has since left Binance. According to Srivastava, her dismissal came a month after she raised the issue. But Binance contends her termination was performance-related and unrelated to her report. The hearing offers a rare glimpse into Binance's internal workings as it faces broader legal

challenges, including a $4.3 billion penalty in 2003 for violating U.S. anti-money laundering laws. Srivastava described Binance's work environment as increasingly chaotic, claiming pressure to close deals compromised ethical practices. Kraken closes NFT marketplace. Crypto Exchange Kraken is shuttering its NFT marketplace nearly two years after its launch, signaling a shift in focus toward new products and services. According to a spokesperson, the company will assist. users in transferring their NFTs to Cracken Wallets or self-custodial wallets of their choice.

The decision reflects ongoing challenges in the NFT market, which has struggled to recover from the 2022 crypto downturn. While Blue Chip NFTs have gained traction recently, rising 90% since Donald Trump's pro-Crypto election win, the Bitwise Blue Chip NFT Collections Index remains 81% below its April 2022 peak. Craigins Closure aligns with broader organization changes, including a workforce reduction and plans to launch a new blockchain in 2025 called Inc that's designed for decentralized trading and lending. Celsius moves forward with second major creditor payout. Celsius, the bankrupt crypto lending platform, is preparing to distribute $127 million in its second payout to creditors, according to a court filing on Wednesday.

The funds will come from its litigation recovery account and will be allocated to creditors in categories including retail depositors. earn accounts, withhold claims, and general unsecured claims. Each eligible creditor will receive approximately 60.4% of their claims as of the bankruptcy petition date, with payments issued in either Bitcoin or U.S. dollars. A weighted average price of $95,036.236% will be used for crypto distributions, while cash payments will be provided to those unable to receive crypto. This marks the second significant distribution after an early, earlier payout of $2 billion to over 170,000 creditors in January.

Celsius declared bankruptcy in 2002 after revealing a $1.2 billion deficit. Its former CEO Alex Machinsky remains under legal scrutiny, facing fraud charges and a potential lengthy prison sentence. I-I-powered meme-coin creator Clanker drives record activity on base. The Coinbase incubated Layer 2 network base achieved an all-time high of 11.4 million daily transactions on Wednesday, fueled by an AI agent named Clanker. This milestone also marked a new record across all Ethereum Layer 2 networks, according to Grow the Pie. Created by Proxy Studio, DotEath, and developer Jack Dishman, Clanker is a large language model

designed to help users deploy meme coins. Since its launch, Clanker has facilitated the creation of over 4,700 tokens, including Clanker, which boasts a market cap of 113.13. $1.8 million. However, base struggled with the surge in activity as many transactions on the network were reverted. Addressing the issue, base creator Jesse Pollack explained on X that a significant portion of those were reverted as a result of folks trying to capture maximum extractable value. Is that the most efficient use of block space? Absolutely not. Is it still a significant demonstration of base scaling? Absolutely. Microstrategy acquires 55,000 Bitcoin for 5.4 billion. This week, Micro Strategy purchased an additional 55,000 BTC for $5.4 billion,

reflecting an average price of $97,000 and $162 per Bitcoin, according to a company filing on Novrinder 25. The acquisition was the largest single purchase of Bitcoin in Micro Strategies history and boosted the company's total holdings to approximately 386,700 BTC. These holdings represent a cumulative investment of $21.9 billion at an average cost of 56,770 per Bitcoin. The latest purchase was funded by proceeds from convertible notes and sales of company stock. Tether and support for Eurostablecoin. Tether has announced it will discontinue its Eurobacked stablecoin, EURIT, citing strategic realignment and evolving European regulatory frameworks. The company has stopped minting EURT and will not.

no longer process new issuance requests and is encouraging current holders to redeem their tokens by Novender 27, 2025. The decision comes ahead of the European Union's markets in crypto-assets regulations set to take effect in December. Miki introduces stricter rules for stablecoins within the EU market, influencing Tether's decision to focus on other projects. Meanwhile, crypto-firm Schumann Financial launched Europe, a mica-compliant Euro-backed stablecoin audited by KPMG and stored in regulated European banks. And that's all. Thanks so much for joining us today.

If you enjoyed this recap, go to unchained crypto.substack.com, that is unchained crypto. com and sign up for our free newsletter so that you can stay up to date with the latest in crypto. Unchained is produced by Laura Shin with help from Matt Pilchard, Juan Oranovich, Megan Gavis, Pam Majimdar, and Margaret Korea. The weekly recap was written by Juan Aranovich and edited by Nelson Wang. Thanks for listening.