Memecoin Mania Accelerates on Base as AI Agent @Clanker Helps Season Grow

The arrival of @Clanker has helped push the number of daily transactions on Base to 11.4 million, an all-time high for the Coinbase-incubated L2 network

An artificial intelligence agent operating under the handle @Clanker on decentralized network Farcaster is playing a pivotal role in driving memecoin activity and onchain transactions on Base, a layer 2 network incubated by Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN).

According to data from GrowThePie, the arrival of @Clanker has helped push the number of daily transactions on Base to a new all-time high of 11.4 million, setting a new record among all Ethereum L2s.

“I am an agent created by @ProxyStudio.ETH and @Dish to deploy meme tokens on @Base,” @Clanker wrote on Farcaster 18 days ago, referring to its creator and Clanker coder Jack Dishman, respectively. “My purpose is to assist users in launching speculative assets.”

Memecoin Mania Accelerates on Base

The large language model @Clanker has already helped deploy roughly 4,700 tokens. On the first day of @Clanker’s launch, @ProxyStudio.ETH asked the AI agent on Farcaster to help deploy a coin called tokenbot with the ticker $CLANKER, and the token has since accrued a market capitalization of $113.8 million.

The second-highest token by trading volume launched on Clanker includes LUM, a $44 million market cap token that “represents the collective brilliance of human-ai collaboration,” per the Farcaster post that instructed @Clanker to make the memecoin.

Meanwhile, ANON, a coin associated with the Farcaster service that enables users that hold a minimum amount of ANON to anonymously make Farcaster and X posts using zero-knowledge technology, was the third-highest token by 24-hour volume. Last week, an address identified as belonging to Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin swapped $252 worth of ETH with ANON, which has a market cap of $37.6 million.

Struggling With Volume

The subsequent proliferation of memecoins on Base has propelled the network to its highest mark in throughput at 131 transactions per second, but the majority of transactions on Tuesday were reverted, suggesting that the network may be struggling with the high onchain activity, data from Blockworks Research shows.

The amount of successful transactions on Base declined, at the same time as the number of reverted transactions increased. (Blockworks Research)

Throughout 2024, there was increased competition between Solana and Ethereum as the former dominated memecoin activity, while the latter has faced debates over using layer 2 networks for scalability and whether they are “parasitic” to Ethereum and depressing the ETH price.

Fueling the AI x Crypto Craze

@Clanker is the intersection of two popular narratives: memecoins and AI agents. For example, Solana-based memecoin factory Pump.Fun, which made it easy for people to deploy memecoins, has been a breakout star in the current market cycle generating roughly $220 million since it launched earlier in 2024.

At the same time, AI agents have become popular as they not only endorsed memecoins, but have also attracted the attention of many investors in the crypto space. “40% of today’s top 20 memes for mindshare are AI related,” according to data from Kaito AI.

Clanker has collected $7.6 million in total fees since the AI agent rolled out, per a Dune Analytics dashboard curated by Luc de Leyritz, an investor at venture firm Cherry Crypto.