BONK: Solana’s Own Dog Coin Sparks Joy for Weathered Community

Just a week into the new year, and new meme coin Bonk Inu (BONK) has already grabbed eyeballs, this time on Solana.

“We’re here to reward everyone that made #Solana what it is today,” the team behind the Solana-focused meme coin, which went live on Dec. 25, wrote on Twitter early last month.

The total supply of the cryptocurrency is set to 100 trillion tokens, half of which were airdropped for free to the Solana community. Buzz surrounding the bounteous airdrop, combined with its developers burning all their tokens, led BONK to surge over 2,000% this week.

About 20% of the airdrop went to Solana NFT collections, 15% to early OpenBook traders, 10% to Solana artists and collectors, and 5% to Solana developers, according to the token’s webpage. Its market cap is still tiny, around $77 million, so holders should expect volatility.

The Inu tokens are a brand of meme coin common across Ethereum and BNB Chain, with Dogecoin knock-off Shiba Inu the premiere example. Token holding binds a meme coin community inspired for potential gains, whether by buzz or by burning supply to boost scarcity.

Bonk Inu is porting crypto’s long-running dog coin tradition over to Solana, albeit with a white paper with scant details on future tokenomics, which may raise red flags for some veteran crypto investors. 

Data shows unique BONK wallets have surged about 250% this week. Austin Federa, head of strategy and communications at Solana, has also expressed enthusiasm for the coin. 

“Why Bonk? Bonk is the first Solana dog coin for the people, by the people with 50% of the total supply airdropped to the Solana community,” the project’s site reads. 

“The Bonk contributors were tired of toxic ‘Alameda’ tokenomics and wanted to make a fun memecoin where everyone gets a fair shot.”

BONK airdrop provides great excuse to try Solana

But, those concerns aside, why shouldn’t BONK be BONK? Solana has been hit negatively in the last two months for reasons including FTX’s implosion. (Investors should however do their own research before buying BONK, or any meme coin.)

Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was a vocal cheerleader and proponent of the blockchain, which has added to concerns about projects leaving the Solana ecosystem.

Read more: Q&A: A Conversation With Solana Founders Raj and Anatoly

The network’s native token SOL plunged to single digits for the first time in nearly two years last week, weighed down by its ties to Bankman-Fried. 

His trading firm Alameda Research invested in Solana Labs’ initial coin offering for SOL and held about $1.2 billion in SOL tokens at the time questions surrounding its balance sheet surfaced. 

Moreover, two super popular NFT projects, DeGods and y00ts, recently decided to abandon ship and move to rival blockchains Ethereum and Polygon. 

But now BONK is appearing to gain steam with major platforms such as NFT marketplace Magic Eden hinting at adopting the token, even though it has only been around less than two weeks.

Solana naturally benefits from increased usage of its network, with Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko sharing a tutorial on how to use decentralized exchange Orca to trade BONK via Twitter.

Solana’s native token SOL has risen up to 36% this past week, according to data from TradingView, having outperformed the market since the start of the year.

Solana may not have fully recovered from its FTX-laden woes, and a dog-themed coin won’t fix everything. But, apparently, it doesn’t hurt.

David Canellis contributed reporting.

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