Into the Clanker-Verse

Introduction

Cheap transaction fees and CEX synergies have anointed Base as the EVM’s premier challenger to Solana. Base has shown strong momentum over the past year, occasionally attracting market-wide capital rotations into Base ecosystem and memes. Still, these rotations have been short-lived and Solana reigns supreme as the leading consumer chain. For now, the idea of Base has outpaced its deliverables. Base’s most substantive dialogue and strongest dev talent lives on Farcaster, which has become increasingly secluded from CT. Farcaster and Base’s identities have become increasingly intertwined, spawning a degen-meets-hippie culture.

Virtuals has established itself as the casino of choice on Base, with fundamentals that measure up nicely to PumpFun and AI16z. Clanker has an emerging ecosystem that warrants consideration here as well. This memo will be a follow up on our previous Clanker post in November, exploring why Clanker’s ecosystem may have the strongest claim to Base proxy status.

Clanker

Clanker is a Farcaster-native AI agent for deploying tokens. Users can prompt Clanker to deploy an ERC-20 token on Base by tagging it on Farcaster with the desired token name, ticker, and thumbnail. When Clanker deploys a token, it initiates a single-sided 1% fee pool on Uniswap v3. Currently, 60% of LP fees go to Clanker and 40% go to the creator. This is subject to change. Prior to Nov-14, the fee split was 75%/25% Clanker/creator.

Clanker usage slowed after an initial craze, but is now rebounding as a vibrant ecosystem begins to form around it.

Clanker’s role is beginning to shift towards backend infra for a promising group of new projects, acting as the glue that holds everything together. Some of these projects are closely partnering with Clanker or act as extensions, while others are simply deploying tokens via Clanker and aligning themselves within the Clanker ecosystem.

Proxy Studio

Clanker was created by proxystudio.eth and dish. CLANKER is the first token launched by Clanker. In the midst of Clanker’s initial hype phase, there was a fair amount of speculation around which token holds rights to Clanker’s revenue. There was a compelling case for PROXY, the governance token of proxystudio, to be the main beneficiary of Clanker earnings. Reading between the lines of insider dialogue, (the token address shared for Clanker is the CLANKER token, among other things) CLANKER appears to be the main token and the market seems to agree, with CL