BONK: Solana's Airdrop Underdog

On Christmas Day 2022 a group of developers on the Solana network started handing out a new token for free. It was called BONK, it had a cartoon dog for a logo, and half of all the BONK that would ever exist was given away to people who had stayed loyal to Solana through the worst year in its history. There was no sale and no investors buying in early. Within weeks the giveaway had done something the network's official backers could not: it got people trading on Solana again.

Two years later BONK was worth more than $4 billion. In October 2026 it is worth about $271 million, it has lost $20 million from its own community fund to an attacker who bought a vote, and South Korea's biggest exchange has stopped trading it.

Why Solana needed a lift

Solana is a blockchain, a shared public ledger that records who owns what, built to be faster and cheaper than Ethereum. Its own currency, SOL, plays the part that a share price plays for a company: it rises when people want to use the network. Through 2021 its biggest champion was Sam Bankman-Fried, whose exchange FTX and trading firm Alameda Research had bought into Solana heavily and promoted it everywhere.

When FTX collapsed and filed for bankruptcy on 11 November 2022, Solana went down with it. SOL had traded around $260 at its 2021 peak and at about $37 just before FTX failed. On 29 December 2022 it fell to roughly $8, its lowest price since early 2021.

The giveaway

BONK is a memecoin: a token that exists for fun and for trading, with no company, earnings or assets behind it, whose price depends only on how many people want it. Holding one is closer to owning a collectable than a share. Its creators, a loose group of Solana developers who mostly stayed anonymous, set the supply at 100 trillion tokens and pitched it as "the first Solana dog coin for the people, by the people".

The distribution was the point. Instead of selling tokens to venture capital funds, the professional investors who usually buy cheaply before the public, the team gave half away in what crypto calls an airdrop: tokens dropped into people's digital wallets for free, like a company mailing free shares to its loyal customers. According to the launch plan, 20% went to holders of 40 Solana NFT collections (NFTs are digital collectables, such as numbered pieces of artwork recorded on a blockchain), 15% to early users of a Solana trading venue called OpenBook, 10% to Solana artists and collectors and 5% to Solana developers.

People who had watched their SOL lose more than 90% suddenly held something that was going up. BONK rose more than 100% in a single day in early January 2023, and SOL climbed with it, to about $13.70 on 4 January. Trading volume came back to the network. Analysts and Solana's own users credited a free dog token with the turnaround.

From joke to $4 billion

BONK kept growing as Solana recovered. In December 2023 Binance, the world's largest exchange (the crypto equivalent of a broker), listed it, and the price roughly doubled in a day. It opened the door for a wave of other Solana memecoins, including dogwifhat (WIF) and later the tokens launched on Pump.fun, a website that lets anyone create one in minutes.

The peak came on 20 November 2024, when Upbit, South Korea's largest exchange, started trading BONK against the Korean won. The price hit a record of about $0.000058 per token and the market value, the price of one token multiplied by every token in circulation, passed $4 billion. BonkDAO, the body that runs BONK's community fund, had just announced plans to buy back and destroy a trillion tokens, a crypto version of a share buyback.

In 2025 the BONK name moved into the stock market. In July, a BONK-linked launch site called LetsBONK.fun briefly overtook Pump.fun as the busiest place on Solana to create new memecoins, The Block reported, and it spends half its fees buying and destroying BONK. In August a Nasdaq-listed drinks company, Safety Shot, agreed to take about $25 million of BONK from the token's founding contributors in exchange for preferred shares, and began holding BONK as its main treasury asset. In October 2025 it renamed itself Bonk, Inc. and started trading under the ticker BNKK.

The vote that cost $20 million

BONK's community fund is run as a DAO, short for decentralised autonomous organisation: holders vote with their tokens, like shareholders at an annual meeting, and the result is carried out automatically by code, with no board to stop it. In July 2026 that design was turned against it.

An anonymous wallet filed a proposal that buried a transfer of about 4.4 trillion BONK, worth roughly $20 million, under motivational language. A second wallet spent about $4.4 million buying just over 1% of the supply on Bybit and Binance, which happened to be the minimum turnout needed for a vote to count. On 6 July only seven wallets voted, the attacker's wallets supplied 99.878% of the votes, and the code paid out the treasury. No software was broken. The full account is in the Hack Database, in "BonkDAO: $4.4M Bought the Vote That Paid Out $20M, All by the Rules".

Much of the haul was moved to Binance, Coinbase and OKX and sold over the following two weeks, according to on-chain tracking reported by PANews. BonkDAO said it had identified the wallets and told law enforcement, but no recovery has been announced. On 7 August 2026 Upbit said it would stop trading BONK, citing a security incident whose cause had not been resolved and a failure to disclose important information promptly. Trading on Upbit ended on 7 September. BONK fell to its lowest price since November 2023. Bithumb, Upbit's Korean rival, kept it, as did Binance, Coinbase and Kraken.

On 16 October 2026 one BONK was worth about $0.0000031, according to CoinGecko, about 95% below the November 2024 record. The token that was given away to save a network is still trading. It is just worth a great deal less, and the giveaway's community fund turned out to be easier to take than anyone had planned for.