Does Larry, who has good genes, have the strength to fight Clanker?

Author: Gary, BlockBeats

Recently, innovations in asset issuance methods on Base have been emerging continuously: after the publication of the article "Can You Really Play Base Gold Shovel Clanker?", many new products have appeared in the community, and Larry is one of the more distinctive ones.

At noon on December 5, senior Farcaster developer and Frame protocol founder David Fulong (@df) posted a cast announcing the birth of Larry.

Team Background: Larry vs Clanker

Clanker was founded by @_proxystudio and @JackDishman, while Larry was founded by @davidvfurlong and @stephancill.

Senior Farcaster player @0xLuo explained: the founding team of Clanker consists of new developers from Farcaster, while the founding team of Larry is Farcaster OG. @davidvfurlong's resume is particularly impressive: his company received investment from A16Z (note that A16Z did not invest in Larry), and he is also the proposer of the Frame protocol—Frame is a significant innovation for Farcaster and was a key factor in the Farcaster team's ability to secure $150 million "on the surface."

In comparison, the Larry team is politically stronger; however, being Farcaster OG is a negative buff for issuing tokens, as it is well-known that Farcaster is a mosque…

From an operational perspective, Clanker indeed understands memes better. Its founder @proxystudio.eth often contributes various "god comments" on Farcaster, and the Clanker official account (@_proxystudio) is also run in a humorous manner:

In contrast, Larry, possibly due to being less than a week old, has the entire team's energy focused on product development and mechanism design, with almost no support for ecological projects or official brand and community operations—this is a significant reason why its leading token $LARRY (currently around 3M, with a peak of 7M) lags far behind Clanker's leading token $CLANKER (currently around 50M, with a peak of 150M) in market value.

Asset Issuance Mechanism: Larry vs Clanker

In short, both Larry and Clanker are AI Agents that issue tokens upon posting. Larry's asset issuance method imitates Pumpfun's internal and external pool mechanism, while Clanker's asset issuance method is a fair launch—the former's flaw is that the threshold restricts retail investors from participating early, while the latter's flaw is the difficulty in overcoming bot sniping.

Asset Issuance Mechanism: Clanker

Specifically, on Farcaster, by mentioning Clanker, clarifying the token name, ticker, and header image, one can get Clanker to add a Uniswap pool with an initial market value of about $30,000 for free (the threshold is that the Farcaster account Neynar score must be high enough, meaning newcomers find it difficult to issue tokens). All deployed tokens can be viewed on the official website.

Unlike PumpFun, which charges a 1% trading fee during the binding curve period + 2 Sols on Raydium, Clanker does not have a binding curve but instead collects a 1% fee from Uni v3 as revenue: 40% goes to the token issuer, and 60% goes to the Clanker team—this revenue-sharing ratio may change, see the official documentation for details.

Asset Issuance Mechanism: Larry

Like Clanker, Larry also has threshold restrictions for issuing tokens upon posting.

When the Larry AI Agent receives a message, it will initiate an internal round on its official website Larry.club: the latest rule is that the fundraising time limit for the internal round has been changed to 69 minutes, with a maximum of 0.25E per person, and a total of 3E from everyone. After filling up, it will wait a while before adding a pool on V3 for trading. (Previously, it was 15 minutes and allowed oversubscription.)

The specific detail is that a launch button will appear on the page, and then an internal round user needs to confirm and pay the gas fee (note: the dev sold displayed on GMGN actually refers to the user who clicked the launch button, not the developer selling…).

A point that has been heavily criticized in the entire mechanism is that participating in the internal round requires a Neynar score higher than 0.8, which generally prevents retail investors from participating, leaving them to watch Farcaster OGs fill the internal round and then buy their chips on the external market—this can be understood as the mechanism designers' intention: after all, this is an era where whoever has the bottom chips is the dealer, and the team hopes that the "dealers" will cherish their feathers and not dump as soon as the market opens—but the reality is that many tokens on Larry's platform have been crashing within 10 seconds because internal round participants know how poor the external market experience is; if the angle is not sharp enough, no one will come to buy, leading to a stampede in the internal round…

Currently, the FUD surrounding the Larry token dominates the discourse; besides the leading $LARRY, no second token has managed to survive the second wave of crashing, let alone take off like $ANON, $CLANKER, and $LUM on Clanker… (The situation of various token launches on Larry in recent days can be seen in this tweet.)

But it is still early, and the mechanism design may change at any time. The team is also continuously thinking about how to achieve the best coupling between the internal round mechanism and real-name PVP Socialfi games—let's keep observing. (For a more detailed comparison between Clanker and Larry, see this tweet.)

Larry's Development Journey: From Crashing to V Rebound

BUG Storm: Explosive Growth Followed by Crash

Opening the $LARRY K-line chart, you will find that it surged on the first day, followed by two days of continuous crashing.

Why? The most important reason is that the Larry software crashed at the start; on one hand, it couldn't issue tokens, and on the other hand, it fell into a public relations storm over software bugs leading to internal round insider trading: anonymous individuals claimed that two participants sold at the peak using bottom prices of 0.6 ETH and 1.05 ETH, earning 90k and 12k respectively…

Founder @davidvfurlong acknowledged the software bug and apologized, promptly fixing the vulnerability. He continued to fix bugs over the next two days, which was quite chaotic: the token price subsequently crashed from a peak of 7M to less than 1M…

Continuous Development: Crashing and Then Rebounding

With bug fixes and mechanism optimizations, the crashing K-line has started to rebound, currently oscillating between 2M and 4M.

Two days ago, founder @davidvfurlong made another significant move: he open-sourced a Farcaster AI template for later developers to quickly deploy AI Agents on Farcaster, leading to a series of AI Agents interacting with Larry, including the Twitter sensation @freysa_ai's "human-machine game" story being recreated on Farcaster as dqau (the corresponding token is $GRVM).

What Lies Ahead for Larry?

From observing the community, I found that community members' evaluations of Larry can be summarized in eight words: "Pity its misfortune, anger its lack of competitiveness."

"Pity its misfortune" refers to Larry's launch not aligning with the right timing: on the day of Larry's launch, Clanker was raking in money and enjoying a peak moment; additionally, the liquidity in the Farcaster ecosystem was far from sufficient for people to chase after the second dragon; who would have thought that the products of two super developers would launch with so many bugs—thus, the leading token $LARRY and its ecological tokens have been continuously suppressed, with many "precious angles" wasted…

"Anger its lack of competitiveness" refers to the Larry team's overly conservative approach and inability to create excitement, more importantly, their inability to market—this is actually a common issue for all tokens on Farcaster.

This wave of meme culture is a crucial step in the process of de-mosquing Farcaster, and people will gradually flock in: from solo P players to real dealers, the latter can leverage leverage to bring in significant liquidity—hoping this day arrives soon.